Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions

claytoncubitt:

“We’re primed and ready now and have lots of experience publishing all those random opinions about people and things on Twitter, Yelp and Facebook already. It’s time for a centralized, well organized place for anonymous mass defamation on the Internet. Scary? Yes. But it’s coming nonetheless.

This has been on my mind for a long while now. Our minds haven’t evolved much over the last few thousands of years, but the spread of quick fire opinions is now moving at the speed of light and forever findable on the Internet. We’re still wired to think of gossip as something that spreads quietly behind the scenes, and relatively slowly. But we’re already in a world where it’s all completely public, there are few repercussions to the person spreading it, and it is easily searchable. No wonder people freak out. We’re fish out of water.

Sure, we’ve evolved a legal infrastructure to deal with libel, slander and defamation. Those laws worked well in an era of the printing press, and sort of stretched to cover radio and television. But they are as ineffective against the Internet as copyright laws are in battling music piracy.” -Michael Arrington (via Marc D Schiller)

See also: Facebook May Share User Data With External Sites Automatically

This has come up a lot lately, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s coming quicker than any of us think - so much of our social contract is possible only without the burden of documentation, we can only ignore the failings of humans when not constantly confronted with evidence.

We’re entering an age where the market on shame will be flooded, and the social value of shame will plummet as a consequence. But right now, the initial reaction will be an attempt to inflate the value and costs of shame, as an attempt to (over) correct what will be interpreted as a conflict between our values and our reality.

Reality will win. A lot of (social) lives will be casualties of a long, and doubtless brutal battle.

Reputation isn’t dead, it’s dying (more accurately, changing). And the death throes will do a considerable amount of damage.

claytoncubitt