AUTHENTICITY IN SOCIAL MEDIA: HOW INSTAGRAM USERS RESPOND TO THE INTRODUCTION OF A ROBOT A discourse analysis based upon findings acquired through text mining of the user discourse in the comment section to three of Miquela’s Instagram posts

Abstract

The developments of digital technologies on social media have made it harder to distinguish the real from the fake. It has become harder with the advent of a non-human influencer, who arguably seems to be perceived as ‘real’ since she is honest about not being ‘fake’. This thesis aimed to find how the user discourse in the comment section to three of Miquela’s Instagram posts, reveals a perception of authenticity towards Miquela as a computer- generated influencer. There is not one clear definition of what is meant by authenticity, but the most agreed-upon definition is that it broadly refers to what is ‘genuine, real and true’. Underneath this meaning, authenticity is a concept that has been defined in many and radically different ways across multiple disciplines. I explored authenticity as understood from the perspective of social assumptions, namely: authenticity as a discursive term. Through text mining as a tool of distant reading I formulated three topics, namely: ‘forms of address’, ‘positive expressions’, and ‘expressions of confusion’. With the help of the ‘tools’ of discourse analysis as presented by Gee, the words ascribed to each topic were explored to see how people possibly perceived Miquela and what this might say about the contemporary ideas of authenticity. My exploration of the corpus portrays that perceived authenticity is possibly not based upon judgments of whether something or someone is authentic in the sense of real and original, but rather on whether something or someone is portrayed accurately, or at least is believed to be portrayed accurately. Making sincerity again important in the understanding of what is perceived as authentic online.