The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Where to put the price tag or, to put it in a more academic way, where value is stored is one of the central quandaries in the City Authentic, a term I use not only to title this book but to describe a set of policies, practices, and ideas that leverage our modern desires for meaning and belonging to drive economic development.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Instead, the advertiser must carve out a need or identify some hole in the world and make a reasonable argument that its product fills the void. The more ephemeral and abstract the thing is, the more postmodern the advertising can be because, ultimately, the goal of postmodern advertising is to elicit an emotion and attach the object to that emotio
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constructive authenticity
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
We seek out authentic experiences because we want a break from modern drudgery and to experience something untouched by marketing and the profit motive. But because fulfillment of this desire is so valuable, our search for authenticity is “precorporated,” a word coined by the cultural theorist Mark Fisher to describe the “pre-emptive formatting and
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Both the intellectual history of authenticity and the recent scholarship on how authenticity behaves in media and tourism settings are indicative of an irredeemable system of striving and false hope.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Such a thing is also existential because it affirms the existence of yourself as you are and who you wish to become (e.g., a Hoosier turned New York City fashionista). Unlike objective or constructive authenticity, “existential experience involves personal or intersubjective feelings activated by the liminal process of tourist activities.”
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Authenticity is a poison pill at the end of a long rat race. Nothing short of dispensing with the inherently capitalist notion of authenticity will give us relief.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
The second kind is constructive authenticity. It answers the question, Have I witnessed what I expected? We experience constructive authenticity when expectations set by media and advertising are fulfilled.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Capitalists build cities designed for bourgeois identity performance and commerce only to invest in them so heavily that all that can afford to exist are carefully managed environments: postmodern corporate mishmashes of symbols and architectural referents that have no discernible connection to a past, only a technologically mediated amalgam of int
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This shift from origins to style means that authenticity itself “becomes a tool of power.”