'Shame' by marcandrelariviere on flickr (cc-by-nc-nd)
Recently, Michael Arrington posted on TechCrunch to suggest that as more and more details of our lives are discoverable online, “indiscretions” would become less damaging. His basic point was that
Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try.
He called his article “Reputation is Dead.” That’s a strong statement by itself. The availability of information about people who are hardly celebrities is trending way up, but that doesn’t mean reputation is gone. People will respond to what is available and judge people as they always have, though Arrington may turn out to be right about college party photos becoming a less significant reputation factor when many of the reputation judges are pictured in some as well.
However, reputation in the abstract will remain an important part of identity online. How it is measured changes with the situation. For example, in the early days of Twitter, perhaps through Ashton Kutcher beating out CNN in a race to a million followers, you might legitimately measure somebody’s influence by how many people followed them. But as “fluff” accounts and services offering “guaranteed” methods to buy more followers proliferated, people stopped measuring one’s worth directly by follower count. Instead, now we look at who is on lists made by those we respect and find good people when they are retweeted or #followfriday’d into our timelines. These methods still rely on evaluating reputation, but they might not take college photos of that user into account. Respect is spread through others whom you already respect.
When trying to judge a stranger’s (or job candidate’s) reputation, today we might use a Google search on their name. Arrington suspects that in the future, such a search would turn up embarrassing images, gossip, and smears posted by others along with one’s website or blog, Facebook or LinkedIn profile. The picture of this person is made up of these elements, according to Google. But how does Google decide what to put on the first page of results? The algorithm attempts to sort out the most important and “relevant” links, and sorts them in front of pages that aren’t as “important.” While the PageRank algorithm is evolving, especially to include more real-time information, Google’s primary tool to judge relevance is the number of other pages in the index that linked to the first. Hence, when you search for somebody, you probably will first see the pages about them that other people think are important, and less likely to see those that were not worthy of a link or a retweet.
For transgressions of community standards that are not under the jurisdiction of law enforcement norms of society govern which “indiscretions” are important enough to gossip about. When people violate norms, one option available to the community is public exposure of the violation. Through embarrassment, the violator is encouraged not to do it again. But the traces of the shaming linger long after, scattered around the Internet. College party photos may get enough chatter and relinking to make them relevant in a search, depending on factors that include the values of the people who see them, what they think the significance is for the person photographed, and how funny it is. (Michael Phelps’ party photo scandal was a lot more significant than people who aren’t celebrities). Individuals decide when a photo is worthy of a retweet based on a gut reaction that takes into account the severity of the action and the reputation of the transgressor. I wrote about how norms are enforced on the Internet through this sort of gut check in my thesis (section 4.7) about reusing others ideas. My example there was that people have an innate sense of when an appropriation of somebody else’s work is simply a “rip-off.” When people sense that somebody has ripped off the work of somebody else, the Internet-connected response is to make a little noise about it, by reposting the evidence, by joining a Facebook group bringing attention to the issue, or simply echoing somebody else who did so. Whenever something like this happens, the transgression gets magnified and becomes more relevant in search results for that person. If a prominent figure is responsible, it might even find its way into a “controversy” section of his or her Wikipedia entry.
An example of norms in action online is the recent controversy over the Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, MS denying a lesbian student from bringing her date to prom. Besides an ACLU court case, thousands of people posted about it online. The traces of the scandal now dominate the Google search record and will probably occupy a space in the Itawamba School District’s Wikipedia page for decades. The school’s actions went against the values of so many people on the Internet that they felt compelled to post about how outrageous they felt it was. This is the reaction to events that are seen as significant. Relatively minor incidents like the party photo of a non-celebrity in an age where there are increasingly findable party photos of anybody is unlikely to provoke such a widespread response. Arrington may be right that if it seems like “everybody is doing it,” the significance of minor indiscretions become less significant and less likely to be relinked and gain damaging prominence.
One prominent response to Michael Arrington’s post was Fred Wilson’s, which argued that building a reputation online through social media is the key to combating smears. One of his examples of this point is that people who know you will defend you if you are unreasonably attacked. While it becomes easier to slander somebody online and make that perspective visible, people who have a strong Internet presence that highlights their capabilities, experience, and knowledge, that information will remain the bulk of the relevant results on a Google search about you, because it is where most of the action is. As gossip about an old picture of you fades after a few days, your online career continues through all the posts, comments, tweets, and conversations you produce. At some point this outweighs minor “indiscretions.”
Perhaps on the Internet, the lesson is that you should be yourself, yet conscious of how you make the presentation. Your true value will shine through if you keep letting it shine, even if your online presence has a few blemishes. However, when you are posting or retweeting to shame someone or an institution, be intentional about the norms you want to build and try not to go crazy over what is insignificant in the long term.