Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Regarding online reputations and redress of grievances
Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club considers online reputations, and whether there might be a mechanism for redressing damage to same, a modern equivalent of dueling.
I am not optimistic that either legal process or extralegal conflict -- a "Truth Duel" -- can restore an online reputation to pristine condition. It is possible, however, that our conception of reputation may change as we understand the impact of our permanent and searchable online footprints. This may already be happening to the generation one step younger than Richard and I. Who under the age of 25 has not seen endless libel online and the constant spreading of gossip, and, indeed, been hurt by it themselves? Does the Facebook Generation believe what it reads online with anything like the credulity of their parents? I doubt it. When today's young people climb into positions of authority, will reputation weigh as heavily as it does today? If everybody has skeletons in their online closet, will we still see a skeleton as a skeleton? How will employers even hire people born after 1985 if we do? Won't they all have some degrading photograph or humiliating blog post online somewhere?
Perhaps the problem described in Richard's post is an artifact of our assumption that online reputation and traditional reputation are unified in a single "reputation." What if the idea of a unitary reputation is already obsolete, but old fogies like Wretchard and TigerHawk do not know it yet? It may be that in the future we will rely on "real world" reputation as we always have, but we will discount garden variety online evidence so heavily we will not consider it probative in the assessment of another's character. That would certainly be the most convenient answer for the generation that will come in to authority long about 2020.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Jan 17, 02:18:00 PM:
Reputation has already disappeared as a useful tool for measuring anything. The internet has largely accelerated, but is not the cause, of reputation's decline. The decline of reputation began with increasingly restrictive government mandated hiring practices where all questions and considerations had to be job related. You heard someone was a wife-cheating drunk? Just how does that effect job performance if there are no unexplained days off and the work is satisfactory? Others can decide whether this was a good thing or not, but it is what began the decline in reputation as a concept of social value.
