The Authentic Website

The Authentic Website

While studying what factors make art authentic, I began wondering to myself if there were such things as “authentic web pages” as well. I decided to use the definition of “authentic” that Walter Benjamin defined. He described an authentic artwork to be an artwork bound by space and time. After much analysis, I concluded that there indeed are such things as authentic and inauthentic web pages. Later in this paper I will tell you why knowing the authenticity of a page is actually is very useful knowledge to have.
Let’s study each factor that determines authenticity for a web page: space and time. Authentic artworks are bound by space, whether it be the museum they are exhibited or in a gallery of some sort. Likewise, authentic web pages are also bound by space, only they are bound within cyberspace. The interesting thing about web pages is that they each have a very specific location in the cyberspace world. This “location” is the URL address of the web page. Since all web pages have different URL addresses, all web pages are “authentic” in the sense that they are all bound by space (or cyberspace.) However, authenticity also requires that something be bound by time, and this is what segregates the authentic web pages from the inauthentic.
Facebook, Xanga, email, forums, online news– What do these all have in common? They are all bound by time. They are all examples of authentic web pages! Facebook records the exact time and date someone comments on someone else’s wall. Blogs and emails are by definition, messages sent out with honestly recorded times. Online news would be useless if it were not bound by time. What would be point of reporting “The Red Sox won today” if no one knew if the article was posted today, last week, or last year? Understanding the time in which a web page is updated or posted is so crucial for understanding the content of the page itself. This is exactly how understanding the time period an artwork was created in is crucial for understanding an artwork. Because emails are bound by time, email users can recognize how far in advance someone has called for a meeting, at what time someone has obtained certain information, and other useful information. Since Weather.com also announces the time in which its contents were published, web browsers can read through the content and judge its credibility based off of how recent the last weather update was published.
For an authentic web page to announce its time of publicity is very important not only because it provides context for which the content was updated, but it also is a statement saying that the content of the web page does not need to necessarily hold true for any given time after the posted time and date of publicity. Weather.com can boldly proclaim that the five-day forecast will be all sunny days and then change the forecast to all cloudy days, since people realize that as time progresses, the forecast becomes clearer. Bloggers can also state that they hate something, and then in a later post state that they love something, since it is understood that people’s feeling can change at different times. This is where I agree with Jaron Lanier, that blogs are an honest collection of people’s inputs. However, unlike Lanier, I would still consider Wikipedia.com authentic since it always posts the time of the last edit. Because of this post, readers recognize that the content of the site was approved by another Wikipedia user at a certain time. From that, readers can gauge how much they want to rely on the information given, depending on how long ago the last edit was and so forth.
What are some inauthentic web pages? Well, there are tons of web pages that do not post the times of their last updates. Dictionary.com is a good example. When one looks up a word, one will find that the web page gives several definitions for a word, but one cannot find when these definitions were last updated. Maybe a new definition for a word has formulated since the last time someone updated the website. Unfortunately there is no way for readers to gauge if Dicitonary.com has become obsolete or not. It is situations like these that make authenticity in websites very much appreciated.
My hope for anyone who ever decides to make a web page is that he will make his web page authentic, just like how any artist in the old days would have wanted their masterpieces to be authentic. Name the URL. Post the time and date. Give context for others’ understanding.