Social Capitalists and The New Feudalism

Hutch Carpenter has an interesting post on the evolution of social capital:

In a recent interview with EMC’s Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we’ll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact.

He visualises these trends in the diagram above. In summary they are:

Rate performance of businesses

eBay, which went public back in 1998, played an important role in socializing the concept of people providing online ratings for online sellers. After we receive our purchase, we rate the seller. The collective wisdom identifies top sellers. Got your eye in that Donkey Kong game? Who are you most likely to trust…?


Migration of transparent work and information online

I found this recent Kaiser Family Foundation study fascinating. The amount of time kids spend online – smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device – is now at an all-time high. There’s no denying this: future workers are going to be more accustomed to online engagement and information-seeking than any generation before.


Rely on social media for information

An emerging trend is the transition of where we seek information. Remember libraries, magazines and microfiche? Then the 1.0 websites where we got information? Then the portals that aggregated information from major media sites? Then search augmented all this information consumption?


Putting this all together

It’s that last trend, still early in its cycle, that really points toward the development of formal, online reputations. When we started transacting online with complete strangers or small businesses we never knew, we needed a basis for understanding their credibility. It turns out, crowdsourced ratings are excellent indicators of quality. It also causes small businesses to be aware of the quality of their products and services.

In the years ahead, expect increased usage of social media for getting information and sourcing people, products and services.

I think this is very succinctly argued and broadly agree with it. The question of course is how is this reputation going to be mediated. Hutch quotes Google's Amit Singhal:

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

Now this is where I start to get worried - this is describing the Link Economy as it is today, but the way it works is that its a semi Feudal system where the rich get richer and the "new follower" 's best strategy is to suck up to the popular ones to get that all important link (you can see this behaviour on Twitter) - and woe betide someone who falls out of favour and the lynchmob get them.. Not only that, the Link Economy chooses for popularity not quality, for ephemera and not , for following the fashion rather than the facts. We see it with this blog - write a long high quality article and you get ourr normal traffic and a few intelligent people commenting - write a witty, snarky but lightweight post (aka linkbait) on the ephemera of the day, comments flood in and the traffic goes through the roof. Guess which one the Link Economy rewards?

Now to be fair, these systems are in their infancy and no doubt there will be a lot of development to build ways to mediate them. But when you consider it took Europe 700 years and many bloody wars to get rid of its Feudal systems, it gives you an indication of how vested interests like these are if they are allowed to take root. And you only have to read Animal Farm to see how any system gets perverted.

Now this may sound a bit far fetched, but the original novel on Digital Social Capital (Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) was Dystopian, not Utopian - yet ironically today much of the the writing on Whuffie (the social media currency in Doctorow's novel) is Utopian.

(Update - I didn't realise it, but there is a whole Social Media thingy - #davossocial on Twitter - going on at Davos World Economic Forum this week, Davos is that place where, as the BBC put it, "All the people who got the world into the sh*t its in go". Now, if I were a conspiracy theorist..... )