Say Goodbye To the Information Age: It's All About Reputation Now (aeon.co)

An anonymous reader shares an essay on Aeon magazine by Gloria Origgi, an Italian philosopher and a tenured senior researcher at CNRS : We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the 'information age', we are moving towards the 'reputation age', in which 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. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know.

[...] 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.

Comments

Critical thinking has always been an asset.

[swell]

Gloria Origgi brings up an interesting point of discussion. It purports to relate to the 'information age', but it has always been there.

Every time someone asserts a 'fact', we must evaluate their motives. If they don't have a discernable motive, we have to look to the source--where did that 'fact' originate, whose hands did it pass through? It's a tedious process but the only way to begin evaluating that 'fact'.

Unfortunately, we have to continually monitor our own belief in facts. They tend to become rooted to the extent that their source is forgotten. Those of us who adhere to a religion were probably indoctrinated before we were capable of rationally evaluating information. How can we now go back and confront those assumptions?

Thus, entire societies are pawns in a flow of 'information' circulating endlessly, invisibly in the ether causing a contagion that is nearly insurmountable.

Belief is a matter of accepting 'facts' without question. No sensible person would allow this. Every 'fact' can be evaluated for accuracy on a scale, say from 0 to 9. One gathers the best information available and gives a particular fact a value between those numbers. As more information becomes available, the score may change. It is never zero or nine.

But most people are averse to shades of grey. They need up or down; on or off; left or right; and nothing in between. They like slogans and easy solutions. No painful thinking required. If a fact is asserted loud enough, often enough, then it must be true. Educational systems perpetuate this problem by rote learning with no critical thought process allowed.