A diamond in the rough: Inauthenticity and Gems TV

Abstract

This paper explores inauthenticity in the context of the Gems TV shopping channel using existential phenomenology. Objectively, subjectively and performatively Gems TV fails to convincingly stage a sense of authenticity. This is a televisual format featuring clearcut commercialism, obscure gemstones and opaque verification. Insincere screen performances are not only entertaining, but shoddiness and unpredictability of programming provides backstage glimpses that paradoxically stimulate fantasies of authenticity. Moments of intrapersonal and interpersonal connection arise around viewing. Accordingly, research into the neglected side of the authenticity-inauthenticity dialectic demonstrates that the latter may be a miasma of meanings as complex, contradictory and evocative as the former.