(2018-03-18) Origgi Say Goodbye To The Information Age Its All About Reputation Now

Gloria Origgi: Say goodbye to the information age: it’s all about reputation now. There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it.

information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today.

My reasons for believing that the Moon landing (moon mission) took place go far beyond the evidence I can gather and double-check about the event itself. In those years, we trusted a democracy such as the US to have a justified reputation for sincerity. Without an evaluative judgment about the reliability of a certain source of information, that information is, for all practical purposes, useless.

The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from ‘fake news’ and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies

What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.

the social network of relations that has shaped that content and given it a certain deserved or undeserved ‘rank’ in our system of knowledge.