Since much of modern mass or popular culture is of the pre-fab barn variety, it's not difficult to identify a longing for heritage-defined, community-based products or performances as a significant element of our overarching ethos. There are many thousands of examples of the way th marketplace has exploited this idea. Blue jeans connect with the "authentic" idea of real men doing real work; a Ralph Lauren shooting jacket invokes the "authentic" world of entitled patrician ease; a faux-antique farm table links consumers with the sturdy values of an agrarian past.
This, to me, is the sense of authenticity that pervades mass culture today. It is an idea that is particularly potent in our "thin" consumerist society, offering, as it does, the illusion of purchasable membership in networks defined by exactly the history and shared values that in modern society are available to very, very few.
