A study of conceptualisations of authenticity in relation to young people's self-presentation on social media.

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This project will explore the relationship between authenticity, social media, and education. Throughinterviews, focus groups, and photo-driven data collection this project will explore how young people viewauthenticity online and offline, and how education can respond to these changes in young people's digitalliteracies and online experiences.The relationship of digital technologies to authenticity is complex. Pallud and Straub (2007) suggest thatthe words 'technology' and 'authenticity' clash, in that technology connotes the simulated, whereasauthenticity connotes the natural and real. However, there appears to be a move towards consumers andplatforms desiring authenticity within social media. The popular app 'BeReal' testifies this; the appdistances itself from others that are believed to instil superficial performativity into user practices (Duffyand Gerrard, 2022), and has opened discussions around authenticity in the digital world of constructedself-presentation (DeVito and Birnholtz, 2017). In this changing landscape and given the growing presenceof social media in the everyday practices of young people, this project will explore how young peopleconceptualise authenticity and how this shapes their actions and interactions online and offline.From an educational perspective, this project positions authenticity as a vital part of developing digitalliteracy. The UK computing curriculum notes how in key stages 3 and 4, students should be digitallyliterate, "express themselves and develop their ideas through, information and communication technologyat a level suitable for the future workplace and as active participants in a digital world" (DfE, 2013:1). A keypart of learning to 'express themselves' and be 'active participants' is to navigate matters of authenticity,which are hard to conceptualise as these are partly subjective, partly contextual, and partly about1experimenting with and learning about their own preferential identities. The online and the offline areno-longer separate entities, and our identities in these realms intertwine (Arfini et al., 2021) and separatein subtle ways, creating the need to understand how authenticity or inauthenticity work in the context ofsocial media and contemporary lives for young people. Nonetheless authenticity is a largelyunder-researched and under-theorised concept, particularly in educational research. Given the increasingmoves of social media apps and designs towards authenticity in various forms, this project aims to fill thisgap in the research literature to better understand the importance of authenticity in young peoples' livesand what this means for education and digital literacy.This study is influenced by interpretivist design and will take a phenomenological approach to address theresearch gap. It will employ creative methods, utilising disposable cameras as cultural probes, by askingparticipants to take pictures of what they're doing at a certain time, 3 times a week, for a month. At theend of this month, I will undertake semi-structured interviews with the participants to discuss thesephotos, their views of 'authenticity', and their social media habits, allowing for an analysis about keyconceptualisations of authenticity and online norms. This will be repeated two more times over the spanof 6 months, with the final discussion ending with a focus group for participants. This will create a criticalworkshop for participants to discuss what they have noticed, what may have changed regarding their socialmedia presence, and their conceptualisations of authenticity.