Yeah, I think in that article and a whole lot of writing about "online inauthenticity" or egoism or whatever there's a bad conflation between what's actually digitally happening, and how it's being set up and marketed. For one thing the social media companies are being driven by two huge revenue streams -- trying to sell consumer info to other companies (wildly successful!) and trying to get consumers to look at ads about other companies (not so much!) -- and the way they try to set those up has a huge influence on how people use the services, how the services are designed and conceptualized, only somehow the 'Marxist' analyses like this never take that into account.

And the idea that you can somehow kind of experience the essence of authenticity by participating in the eidos of Beowulf or whatever just seems so wrongheaded to me. There are so few 'originals' of what she's taking as the ideal. That Beowulf ms is the first preserved instance we have of it being written, which is indeed wonderful, but it's not the Ur Original of the poem. There might not even have really been such a thing. The idea of poring over unfinished manuscripts and going "yes, this right here is where the spark flew and caught flame, we can mark it precisely!" is pretty modern, IIRC. It's like that whole cult of Originality goes along with the myth of the Genius Lone Artist and makes me twitch.