The Future of Reputations

Changing Everything?  Was catching up on some reading and ran across this gem of a publication called Edge where earlier this year they had published a series of answers to the question "What will change everything?" What bridges will be crossing that fundamentally really change everything about and around us.  There were articles about social networks, how text will give way to video everywhere, education, computer processing, planetary matters and what we know today or will tomorrow about the brain.  There is a lot there.

The Age of Reputation: The one I got thinking about was was "reputation" by Gloria Origgi, a philosopher and a researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Her areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive sciences applied to new technologies.

She begins by pointing out that the Internet is really what will change our future most but then raises the question of how it changes things the most. Rather than paraphrase, let me quote the premise:

"The Internet is a complex geography of information technology, networking, multimedia content and telecommunication. This powerful alliance of different technologies has provided not only a brand new way of producing, storing and retrieving information, but a giant network of ranking and rating systems in which information is valued as long as it has been already filtered by other people.

My prediction for the Big Change is that the Information Age is being replaced by a Reputation Age in which the reputation of an item — that is how others value and rate the item — will be the only way we have to extract information about it...The age of reputation will be a new age of knowledge gathering guided by new rules and principles. This is possible now thanks to the tremendous potential of the social web in aggregating individual preferences and choices to produce intelligent outcomes."

Anonymous Powerful Algorithms Give Way:  She notes that the anonymous mathematical algorithm for cataloguing and retrieving information will/is giving way to rankings by people...and in some respects "information" becomes irrelevant, or at least subservient, to rankings by people and then the aggregation of those rankings.  The "new generation of search engines whose ranking procedures are simply generated by the aggregation of individual preferences expressed on these pages: no big calculations, no secret weights...results of a query are organized just according to the « grades » each of these pages has received by the users "

The Human Web:  And so the human web really takes hold in what we often think about as a data driven world.  To quote Gloria Origgi again, "this softer Web, more controlled by human experiences than complex formulas, will change our interaction with the net, as well as our fears and hopes about it. The potential of social filtering of information is that of a new way of extracting information by relying on the previous judgments of others."

For many who have been working in, or thinking about, social media, the premise she raises are familiar.  The social web enables people to connect with other people and share perspectives in whole new and powerful ways. Her conclusions, taken beyond web pages to a reputation based and ranked world are most interesting, I thought.

For another good read, be sure to check out the New York Times article about Web Comments/commenters.....some interesting observations there. ...

And, if you think about the two articles together and put comments in the context of these  "reputation rankings".....well, I am not sure what to think :-) .