This week, I was truly impacted by Professor Himpele’s use of the Beatle’s vinyl records as an analogy to “drop the bottom out of the idea of authenticity” and our short conversation surrounding the blurring boundaries between reality and representation. As Professor Himpele explained in class, mp3 recordings are endless layers of representation, which points to the inexistence of a “true”, “authentic” reality. For me, that brief moment represented the culmination of weeks of reading and discussion, making it one of the most salient points of this course to date. I found that this discovery challenged my understanding of authenticity as a standard for a message’s successful communication, a conceptualization that I had been relying on since I was a child. When I was in the 5th grade, my favorite band was the Beatles, and for Christmas I asked my parents for a digital copy of the Magical Mystery Tour on iTunes. Almost insulted by the notion, they insisted that I listen to a more “authentic” medium to capture the true essence of the artist’s message. They eagerly gifted me with an entire collection of the Beatles’ work on cassette. While I sincerely appreciated the gesture, we didn’t own a tape player, so I never got a chance to listen to them. That said, it impressed upon me a lingering respect for the material world rooted in this conception of authenticity’s superiority, which I’ve carried for years…. or at least until Tuesday’s class. After Professor Himpele demarcated the seams of authenticity and exposed it as a bottomless pit, I’ve had to wrestle with and dismantle this unwitting and ultimately irrational commitment to nostalgia. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that the original is not always better. With the very idea of originality called into question, why even consider as a factor when forming an opinion? The mp3 technology’s capacity to provoke these sort of insights and questions is exactly why mp3s, and the Napster era it emerged from, were met with such fear and anxiety by members of the copyright community. In light of this revelation, the notion of ownership seems irrelevant: after all, with this underlying conceptualization of authenticity stripped away, it doesn’t matter who was first, only who was better. As a digital native raised by the Internet, I find it easy to accept this, as I’ve already been indoctrinated by digital realms where intellectual property protection is practically non-existent. That said, I think there’s something to be said for the visceral connection one feels while listening to live music. If the goal of music, and transitively of media in general, is simply to communicate the artist’s message in a way that it evokes its intended emotional response, then mp3s succeed. However, on some level, I still believe that there must be representations that are closer to the essence of original message than others, although I am no longer convinced that it matters. What do you guys think? Is our love of concerts rooted in the “authenticity” of the message or the social context they provide? I am looking forward to dissecting this issue more in class!