Gloria Origgi
CNRS –
Institut Nicod
Epistemic Democracy in the Age of
Internet. The role of trust and reputation in e- democracy
Gloria
Origgi
CNRS
– Institut Nicod
Democracy and
Trust the Age of the Social Web
II
seminario di Teoria Politica
Aosta,
28-30 June 2012
1.
Introduction
The rise of the Internet
within the last 20 years and especially of the social Web in the last 10 years,
has deeply transformed our social, cultural and political customs. Internet has
revealed one of the most powerful means of communication and networking ever
and – like the invention of writing and print - a deep revolution in the
production and sharing of information.
The cyber-enthusiasts of the
1990s, saw the Web as the paradigmatic “disruptive technology” one that would
overturn all of our practices for accessing information and empower users to
collaboratively produce, access, and distribute content in previously
unimagined ways[1].
Over the past decade, this enthusiasm has been replaced by a more nuanced
attitude. Replacing our practices for accessing reality, aggregating
information and creating new forms of public spaces is not simple. Our search
of impartial information is notoriously biased by a number of effects such as
group polarization, information cascades, and conformity[2].
The world in which we live today is far from being a new land of freedom and
democracy. The way in which new technologies of communication are evolving in
networked social spaces is not designed by rules that govern the design of
democratic decision systems[3].
The potentially infinite and free space of the Web is becoming a corporate space governed by few big
companies that control access and make us navigate in a land that we do not own
through an architecture that is variable, invisible and impossible to control.
This has led some authors to talk about a new “Digital Feudalism” and the need
of a new Enlightenment to reach a truly liberal digital democracy[4].
As a result, we face today two
opposite tendencies in the appraisal of the effects of the Internet and the Web
on our lives. On the one hand, apologists see the Web as the primary global
resource to build new forms of civic participation, by democratizing
communication and dramatically decreasing costs of participation in various
forms of mobilization[5]. On the
other hands, critics and pessimists warn about the risks of authoritarian turns
of the new, uncontrolled technocracy the Web is making available, and the
negative effects of polarization of points of views and informational cascades that
discussion through the social networks is creating[6].
Also, while social networks
and other communication technologies such as cell phones have played a major
role in the rising of important recent political movements and revolutionary
awakenings in dictatorial countries, such as the “Arab-Spring” (renamed as the Facebook Revolution), in mature
democracies, their general effects on democratic life are more controversial.
Internet is one among the multiple facets of globalisation, and it is far from
clear today how globalisation is improving democracy. As Habermas points out[7],
the disappearing of (economical, cultural, political) frontiers may have
pernicious effects on our idea of democracy that is still centred on the
State-Nation. What global phenomena such as Internet are bringing about,
according to him, is a reduction of autonomy of the single states and hence
less protection for their citizens, as well as a progressive delegitimization
of forms of control and accountability at the national level.
Yet, apart from the criticisms
based on the global dimension of Internet, the way in which the Web is
structuring itself today - mainly in privately controlled social networks -
although it has enhanced political debate and participation[8]
in some areas of the world, is such that it cannot be considered anymore as a
public space whose structure and maintenance is in the hands of its users.
That is to say that the
relation between IT and democracy is far from being straightforward. Fears and
anxieties of uncontrolled forms of new control go together with an irresistible
optimistic vision of a freer and interconnected world of global citizens.
2.
The Central Puzzle
Among the tensions and
ambivalences that characterize the debate over the role of Internet in
democracy, I will concentrate on an aspect of these contradictions I am more
familiar with, that is, the dimension of trust.
Trust has been a central topic in social sciences to make sense of the Internet[9].
Yet, one of the most striking contradictions about our IT-mediated trust
relationships has been surprisingly neglected. In this paper, I will
concentrate on the following contradiction: while modern democratic societies
ground their accountability in a “disenchanted” form of social trust, that is,
trust that comes out of a series of procedures of “taming” distrust, such as
contracts, law enforcements, transparent procedures (concerning vote,
attribution of rights, allocation of resources, etc…)[10]
the form of trust that seems to reign over the Internet and, especially, the
Social Web, is the most naïve and wild form of blind trust that we have ever
experienced in mature societies.
Liberal democracies have
emerged as a reaction of distrust to the traditional forms of power and
authority such as monarchies and the church[11].
As Mark Warren writes: “More democracy has meant more oversight of and less
trust in authorities”. Constructing a political arena in which people may
confront their divergent interests and arguments means establishing a set of
rules and procedures that allow a “cold” yet guaranteed form of interaction not
based on “warmer” social relationships of trust. Furthermore, modern
democracies are “inclusive” systems, whose aim is to make more and more people
to participate to collective decisions. Inclusiveness implies a transition from
“custom to code”, because the more people are included within the same group,
the less “thick” relationships can be taken for granted[12].
It has been argued at length[13]
that the form of social bond that links mature contemporary liberal democracies
is not trust, but a regulated “distrust”, that is, a thick bundle of
procedures, codes and rules that guarantee citizens that those who govern them have
to be accountable.
Yet, the disenchanted trust
that defines our form of political participation doesn’t seem to be the default
attitude once we are on the Net. Social networking facilities have developed
tremendously since 2007. Studies show that people develop online social
networking even when the levels of reciprocal trust and the comprehension of
privacy and security issue are low[14].
Most people who register on Facebook do not read the Terms of Service and, if
asked, don’t know whether they own or give away the information they make
available on their profile pages.
It is as if masses of
reasonable individuals, who should be guided in their behaviour - according to
the mainstream views in social sciences - by maximisation of interest and
considerations of prudence and rationality, are willing to capitulate their
judgement and responsibility of choice and join privately owned social networks
and companies where they share personal information without the least clue of
what these companies will do with these data, follow the first results of a
Google search, confident that they will be brought to the relevant piece of
content, base their judgements and evaluations on rankings produced by
monopolistic companies. People seem willingly to throw away their privacy,
their capacity of discrimination, their rights of choice and blindly defer to
methods of filtering content and manage participation whose logic is deeply out
of their control.
As the cyber-militant Rebecca
McKinnon has pointed out: “We cannot assume that Internet will develop in a way
that is democracy-compatible”[15].
Sovereignty of the cyberspace is made by private companies that partition it in
ways that are the less and less free and determine how information is gathered,
structured and presented. The cyberworld of web apps and social networks is far
from being a world of free speech and democratisation[16].
The domination of a privately owned social network such as Facebook today is
overwhelming. Paradoxically, the only country in which the use of social
network is fragmented upon a variety of different providers is China, given the
censorship act that blocked the access to Facebook in mainland China in 2009
and, as a consequence, that many different social networks have spread in order
to skip censorship[17].
Here
is a symptomatic quotation about the trustful feelings that inhabit Facebook
users: «This is the promise of Facebook, the utopian hope for it: the
triumph of fellowship; the rise of a unified consciousness; peace through
superconnectivity, as rapid bits of information elevate us to the Buddha mind,
or at least distract us from whatever problems are at hand. In a time of deep
economic, political, and intergenerational despair, social cohesion is the only
chance to save the day, and online social networks like Facebook are the best
method available for reflecting—or perhaps inspiring—an aesthetic of unity.»[18]
A mixture of optimism, credulity and faith seems to be
the dominant attitude that underlies the use of social networks, as if questions
of privacy and security were not relevant to the development of this particular
form of trust. Also, trust is a fundamental ingredient of social relationships,
but it is unclear how people can trust millions of other users to make a fair
use of the information they decide to share publicly.
So, despite the blatant
evidence of the risks on privacy, the control by private companies of most of
the features and applications of the web, people seem to resist any form of
diffidence or, at least of, prudence, and give away their personal data and
relevant information with a unreasonable feeling of being part of a cooperative
process of global democratisation of means of expression.
Why is it so? This paper is an
attempt to solve the puzzle. I think that much discussion about trust and
Internet has revolved around a conception of trust that doesn’t reflect the
form of trust relationships we are involved on the net.
3.
Relational vs. Epistemic Conceptions of Trust
Trust is one of the
most intractable notions of philosophy and social science. That is because a
variety of human interactions are pulled in under the heading of trust. Trust
is involved in any asymmetrical situation in which one party has to take a risk
that depends on the performance of the other party. And risky businesses
concern as many different relations as one can imagine, such as commercial
transactions between parties who don’t know each other, temporally asymmetrical
transactions (I pay you today for a good that I will receive in a week or a
month), love affairs, reliance on experts for important decisions about one’s
own life and health, occasional conversational exchanges among people in the
street, political interactions and, of course, IT-mediated social interactions. Russell
Hardin rightly writes: « As virtually all writers on trust agree, trust
involves giving discretion to another to affect one’s interests. This move is
inherently subject to the risk that the other will abuse the power of discretion
»[19].
Much of the discussion of trust in social sciences
revolves around its relational dimension.
Diego Gambetta’s 1988 anthology on trust and James Coleman’s 1992 work on
social theory laid the foundations of a rational-choice approach to the
relation of trust. Rational-choice theory and its mathematical counterpart,
game-theory, provide various models of social competitive and cooperative
relations under the assumption that the parties that are involved in these
relations are rational and motivated by interest. In this perspective, trust is
a form of risky cooperation. The central question is: « Given that involving
oneself in a trust relationship with others is always risky, when it is
rational to take this risk? »
Of course, even the most pessimistic players are
guided by an optimistic intuition that the risk is worth taking, that is, that
being in a relation will improve our situation much more than staying out of
it.
In this perspective, trust is an essentially cognitive
notion. It is a complex, higher-order belief that takes into account the other
party’s beliefs, interests and possible actions. I have an interest in entering
a trust relationship if only I have reasons to think that the other party has
an interest to reciprocate. Perhaps the most encompassing definition of
rational trust in this tradition is that of Russell Hardin, according to whom
rational trust is a form of encapsulated
interest, that takes the following shape: I believe that it is in the
interest of my party to take into account my interests. So there is no risk, no
submission to authority, no surrender of reasons: just a rational calculus, or
at least, a motivated bet, on the mutual advantages of a cooperative future
together. Notice that, given this definition, it can be rational to trust
another party even when our interests diverge, because the only thing I have to
presuppose is that she or he has an interest to take into account my interests,
even when his interest is different from mine. When are we wrong? Well, of
course, our estimate of the other party’s interests may be based on limited
information, or on a vision of the context of interaction that may be biased by
our own perspective. Or, the other party may have simulated an interest in
being in a relation with us that was selfishly motivated just in order to have
us “on board” and then free-ride on our cooperative stance.
Critics of the “cold” notion of trust in terms of
rational choice say that trust involves an emotional dimension and raises
normative commitments between parties that go beyond the pure calculus of
interests. Karen Jones, Annette Baier[20]
and others, insist upon the emotional and moral dimension of trust, as a
“thick” relationship that makes one accept the inevitable vulnerability of
being dependent on another on a certain matter. The “accepted vulnerability”
is, according to these authors, not a matter of calculus: it is based of a
“pre-rational” estimation of the trustworthiness of the other party and on the
strong feeling that “throwing oneself” in the trust relation creates a positive
attitude in the other party and raises the chances to reciprocate. To see one’s
willingness to be vulnerable to our actions makes us react in the expected way.
Pure rationalist accounts of trust are seen as a form
of reduction of trust to rational distrust.
After all, as I have mentioned at the beginning of the paper, liberal political
theory was largely founded on distrust[21].
Hume, Madison, and to a certain extent Locke, thought that the only intelligent
stance for citizens to take towards government was distrust[22].
Given that I don’t trust the other party, I need to find a rational
justification of the interests she or he might have to reciprocate my trust.
The transition to Modernity is often depicted as a replacement of “warm” trust
relations based on feelings of assurance and moral commitments with “cold” ones
based on rational justifications. Trust in governments as “reasoned consent” is
assured by procedures of accountability that are ways of dealing with the
general distrust of modern societies.
One of the points that is common both to cognitive and
moral treatments of trust is the relational and “choice-based” dimension of the
trust relation, as if it were always a matter of free choice to trust or not
the others. Here is an opportunity to
enter in a relation. If I choose this opportunity, I take some risks. I can
chose to go on or to stay out, and I can base my decision on a rational
calculus of the interests at stake or on an optimistic stance toward the
willingness of the other party to honor my trusting him or her. But, in any
case, I have a choice. I can choose to vote for this person because I think it
is in his or her interest to take into account my interests (for example,
because she or he wants to be re-elected in the future) but I can also choose
to vote for someone else.
Even much of the discussion around the specific trust
relationships we develop through Internet has revolved around the risks and
advantages of relational trust. For
example, in a seminal paper on the subject, the philosopher Victoria McGeer
warned about the fragility of trust relationships developed through Internet
given that people may be dishonest about their identities. And Philip Pettit
argues that Internet is not an appropriate environment for developing trust
relationships because people won’t feel the obligation to reciprocate trust
that we feel in face-to-face interactions[23].
Yet, I don’t think that the notion of relational trust I have tried to outline
here says anything about our trust in information-dense environments such as
the Internet and the Social Web. Trust in these environments is first of all a
form of epistemic trust, that is,
trust in persons or systems through which we are able to extract relevant
information. Massimo Durante raises a similar point in a chapter of a book on Legitimacy 2.0. and e-Democracy : “In a complex networked society of information
consensus is cognitively based on perceived
trust more than on experienced trust: this means that, in media democracy,
it is not only a question of relational
trust, expressed with regards to specific political actors, but it is matter of
systemic trust, expressed in relation
to the system those actors are part”[24]
Internet has been from the onset a major informational and cultural revolution that has been compared to the invention of
writing and printing[25]. The
central new feature of the Internet revolution and, especially, of the Web, is
the role of social networks in the production, distribution and retrieval of
information. The mathematician Jon Kleinberg showed in 2000 that the Web was
organized as a giant social network[26].
Information on the Web is essentially
social, that is, it depends on the pattern of social relations that informs
the search algorithms about where to find it. We do not only develop social
relations on Internet: we use social relations to extract knowledge from it.
Recent research[27] shows that
microblogging sites such as Twitter
are the more and more used to extract information through social search facilities
and that search based access to tweets is becoming increasingly available
through third parties such as Google
and Bing[28].
These algorithms use the social information about who knows whom in order to
extract information and rank it in order of relevance.
The PageRank algorithm that made the
success of Google was based exactly on an automatic reading of the links
between the pages in terms of “votes” that a page gives to another one. The new
algorithms of the social web, such as Google
Social Search and Facebook’s EdgeRank[29],
extract social information such as “likes”, “shares” and “re-tweets” to extract
information and measure its authority.
Unlike the other two cultural revolutions
that I have mentioned, that is, writing and printing, the Web presents a radical change in the conditions for accessing and
recovering cultural memory because it introduces new devices for managing meta-memory. The retrieval of information is an epistemic activity that proceeds
via the previous classifications of cultural authorities. With the advent of
technologies that automate the functions of accessing and recovering memory, meta-memory converges with external
memory. What was a central task of cultural organization becomes another outsourced cognition. If I have in mind a line of
poetic verse, say, « Let us go then, you
and I », but can recall neither
the author nor the period and am unable to classify the style, these days I can
simply write the line of verse in the text window of
a search engine and look at the results. The results are a list of Web sites
ranked by an algorithm that considers both relevance and accessibility. This
list serves a meta-mnemonic function. The highly improbable combination of
words in a line of verse makes possible a
sufficiently relevant selection of information that yields the poem from which
the line is taken as the first result in the search inquiry.
Search-engines
are thus powerful epistemic devices that we trust.
We trust their capacity to perform the cognitive function of meta-memory (i.e.
navigating through memory) in our place. Today, social networks allow other
forms of hierarchisation of authorities, such as the “follow” relation on Twitter, that ranks users’ influence in
terms of numbers of followers.
Trusting a result of a search-engine like
Google, or trusting information socialy extracted from Twitter is a very different form of trust than the relational form
I presented above. It is a form of epistemic trust that is based on different
norms and heuristics of justification among which:
-
experience (I have
double-checked information retrieved by Google and it was right, so I trust
Google in the future),
-
our relation with epistemic
authorities,
-
various reputational cues, on
cognitive and epistemic properties of communication, and
-
structural features of social
networks.
The Web is a “trust machine” that feeds
itself with the social information generated by the numerous social networks
that exist at different levels: (1) at the structural level structure (the
hyperlinks structure), (2) at the level of content (the networks of citations,
social bookmarking systems, etc.) and (3) at the level of people (like in
social networks in the sense of Facebook
or Twitter). The norms and heuristics
we apply to each of these levels can be different. At the structural level, we
trust the reliability of the algorithms such as PageRank for Google or Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm EdgeRank in sorting the relevant
information for us. We can use experience to appreciate their reliability and
also social norms: for example, the fact that Google clearly distinguished at its beginnings between advertized
content and other forms of content may have been a reason to trust this search
engine more than others at its onset. Google used a lot of cues of honesty as good informant[30],
like the public image of “being nice”, the clean homepage of the search
engine without any advertisement or extra-information, etc. The PageRank
algorithm has also a special status among search algorithms, because it bases
its searches on a measure of authority of a website that is fundamentally the
same as the measure of “impact” in the academic world. That is, a website is
more authoritative if it receives more links from other, authoritative
websites. This is exactly the way in which the research community defines its
own measure of prestige, or authority: the prestige of a publication depends on
its impact, that is, on the number of
citations it receives in other publications. The very measure of prestige used
by Google has its own prestige and it is therefore a credible cue of being a
good informant for the users.
Most of the cues of credibility that users
apply to the structural level (1), are applied also to level (2), that is, the
level of content. But the Web itself is not the only producer of trustful signs
for this level: previous classifications, labels, and titles influence the
level of trust of the users. A piece of research content coming from an
influential author of from an influential academic journal or institution will
be considered more credible than a piece of content coming from the unknown
author of a blog. As for the level (3), either we trust people coming from
previous, extra-web, trusted networks (our old friends, our colleagues, people
coming from the same school, etc.), or we develop new trust relationship
through conversational exchanges and mutual exchange of information. The «
stance of trust »[31] displayed
in social communication through the Web is both fundamental and fragile: we
need a minimal trust in order to get in contact with other people and enter new
networks and conversations. That is why all the social networks that work well
are characterized by the presence of a trustful atmosphere, a “halo” of trust
and friendliness that is the trace that people share a stance of trust as a
pre-condition for constructing a communicative space.
As we can see, in all these cases, the
trust we put at work is an epistemic attitude and not purely a matter of
strategic choice: we cannot choose not to trust, because we would not have any
alternative access to information. But we can try to develop more sophisticated
strategies of vigilance about the norms endorsed by these systems, and, when
possible, their technical design. In what follows, I will try to develop the distinction
between strategic vs. epistemic trust, by relying on my previous work on
epistemic trust and then see how this notion applies to the case of trust
online and may help explaining some conundrums of trust in the digital
environments.
4. Default Trust
and Epistemic Vigilance
Epistemic trust is an even more
intractable notion than trust itself. I have tried to elucidate elsewhere what
does it mean to trust in epistemic authority[32].
Here I will briefly summarize my main point on epistemic trust. As I said,
epistemic trust is not relational: it is deferential, that is, it implies a
fundamental asymmetry between the trustee and the truster. It is a form of more
or less justified deference to various authorities. In epistemic matters, we do
not « transfer » our power to someone else who will represent our will: rather
we surrender our reasons to the epistemic authority of someone else whom we
judge in a better position to get the information we need to get. We
do not choose to trust. In most situations we just do not have the choice. A
trustful attitude is thus a starting point, a default stance from which we
begin to navigate the thick informational world around us.
The default
trustful attitude that I am advocating here as a core element of epistemic
trust is not just a gullible attitude, although it may expose us to the risk of
gullibility. Many authors have argued for an epistemic justification of trust.
In his book on the genealogy of epistemic virtues[33],
Bernard Williams, for example, puts trust as a fundamental ingredient in the
evolution of the norms of truth-telling. Edward Craig has argued as well that
the capacity of trusting a “good-informant” on the basis of some indirect cues
of competence and sincerity is epistemically more fundamental than that of
seeking directly true information[34].
Most human
beings have bits of information from which others may benefit. The Web has
revealed this fundamental trait of socially distributed information in a
dramatic way. Surfing on what other people know make us learn faster than going
ourselves looking for the right piece of content. Emulation and conformism
(trust what the others think, and conform your behaviour to theirs) are
powerful evolutionary strategies for the survival of groups[35].
Yet, if a trustful
attitude is a default condition to start any process of information seeking in
information-dense environments, we need strategies to allocate our trust in a
balanced way and avoid gullibility. That is, we need to balance trust with a vigilant attitude. A vigilant attitude
is in my sense not a pre-condition of trust: it is developed within the trust
relationship. For example, paying attention to some cues of consistency in
conversation is an example of a vigilant attitude once we have already accepted
to share a minimal trust with our interlocutor, that is, to accept to talk to
her or him. Evidence shows that social networks’ users have this vigilant
attitude, not towards the information they share,
but towards the information they acquire
through the social interactions. Developing trust of the social Web is a
necessary condition to make it a powerful epistemic tool. Without a massive
sharing of information, we could not acquire so much knowledge by navigating
online. We pay the price of a “blind trust” in sharing to get the advantage of
a vigilant acquisition of information[36].
Many of the
vigilant strategies are under our control, like monitoring the behaviour of our
interlocutors, in order gather information about his or her past records,
etc. but not all. Networked
information displays some biases that are difficult to control and to monitor
by its users. And the fact that we must share first in order to get something
relevant from the social web puts us in an asymmetric situation that can
creates pernicious effects that explain the puzzle of trust I have started
with.
5.
Trust in networks
The social Web
enhances strategies of deference and epistemic trust by making information
available through social networks. The Twitter
mind deploys a follower-leader strategy, by giving epistemic advantages to
those who choose the right leaders to follow, that is, the good informants.
Yet, trust in these social networks is thus crucially different from trust in
social relations as depicted in standard visions of society.
Networks have
notorious biases and properties that are not immediately compatible with the
construction of a distributed democracy of knowledge, as the Web seemed to
promise. First of all, networks such as the Web are aristocratic: this means that information tends to concentrate
around few authorities to which everybody refer and the more its concentrates
in this way, the more probable is that those few authorities become even more
authoritative (the notorious rich get
richer effect). Networks are hierarchical, enhance authority asymmetries
and encourage the development of techniques of control such as the production
of evaluations, rating and ranking systems that simplify the organization of
information[37].
We are living
is a networked information society: that means that information is organized in
networks that display hierarchical properties and authority effects that may
not be compatible with a democratic use of information. In order to have a
vigilant attitude towards information we receive from the networks, we should
be aware of the structural effects of hierarchisation of information that are
built-in the system. Collective decisions systems and systems of aggregation of
information are usually designed to balance these effects. Is the social web
designed in such a way? Unfortunately, the answer is in the hand of few people
and it is less than clear that the motivation in designing the connecting
features of the web is that of balancing these effects.
5.
Solving the Puzzle: Default Trustful Attitude and Reliance on Reputational Cues
Trust in
networks is thus a complex epistemic attitude that mixes various social and
cognitive competences and is modelled by the belonging of each individual to
these reticular structures. Two central components of this complex attitude are
worth describing because they may help solving the puzzle I have presented
above:
(1) A
default trustful attitude that shapes our communicative practices. As I said,
we do not choose to trust others. We are permanently immerged in social
relations that make us gain knowledge about the world. We can be vigilant, but
without a default trustful attitude that disposes us to learn from others and
accepts what they say, we would risk to loose too much relevant information. In
epistemic trust, considerations of relevance seem to overrule considerations of
accountability.
(2) A
strong reliance on reputational cues that have cumulated through a number of
interactions with the networked system over time. Reputation both
helps fashion collective processes of knowledge and is a central criterion for
extracting information from these systems. It is a fundamental shortcut for
cumulating knowledge in processes of collective wisdom. It is also an
ineluctable filter. In an environment where sources are in constant competition
for attention and direct verification is unavailable,
rankings and ratings allow us to have and use information. Our minds can never
investigate or manipulate the world in solitude. The greater our uncertainty
about the content of information, the stronger our reliance on the opinions of
others to evaluate this content. Just as our lore is woven into the fabric of our sentences, our concern for reputation is
woven into the fabric of our social network systems. This claim is in part conceptual,
in part empirical. Even if not all such systems reflect this passion for
ranking, we can expect those that do will generate
more epistemically reliable products than those that do not.
These two
features of epistemic trust in web-based social networks may help to solve the
puzzle of the “enchanted trust” on Internet in opposition with the
“disenchanted trust” typical of mature democracies and explain why people so
naïvely trust on Internet. As I said, these two forms of trust are deeply different,
the first one being a cognitive posture we need
to take in order to filter the too thick amount of information we have to
parse.
6. Reducing the
epistemic deficit: assessment devices and epistemic responsibility
How can we try to reconcile these two radically
different trust attitudes? If we want to make of Internet a public, democratic
space that enhances egalitarian social relations, we should try to balance the
“wild” forces of the social networks by providing devices and techniques that
help reducing the epistemic deficit
that societies of knowledge are creating between lay-people and IT-based
expertise. It is important also to distinguish between the classical
deferential relations to experts (human experts) and the new forms of deference
generated by “automata-experts” such as search engines and many other IT-based
products whose algorithms filter information. People trust search-algorithms,
reputation algorithms etc. as if the relevance of the information they get from
them was so high that costs of questioning the way in which they got the
information were perceived as prohibitive. But they are not prohibitive and
there are plenty of ways of “unpacking” the systems and make people more aware
of the biases and effects that influence the results.
As
democracies have thrived by developing forms of “disenchanted trust”, a
democratic networked e-society should encourage the production and spreading of
devices whose aim is to assess the credibility of the systems that produce the
so-called “trusted information”. Trusted information comes very often packed in
rankings. Examples of rankings are: hierarchies of results generated by a
search engine, where the results at the top are perceived as “more trustworthy”
than those in a lower position; rating systems, such as indicators[38]
of quality, that
is, a named, rank-ordered,
simplified and processed piece of data that purports to represent the past or
projected performance of different unit, or a classification system; influence
measures, such as the number of “likes” or scores that measure the social
impact of an individual or a company on the Web[39].
All these devices, although they constitute a new form of “social objectivity”,
have biases and can be potentially manipulated. A responsible use of these
devices goes with an awareness of the users of the possible biases and
manipulations. A society of knowledge as the one that new technologies have
made possible will thrive only if we will develop rules and regulation to
protect the epistemic trust of citizens. Rankings should be multiplied on
different supports according to different scales, to avoid winner-takes-it all
effects and informational cascades.
Furthemore, social
networks are today a dangerous cocktail of user-supplied content (what we put
online on our profiles), open APIs and client-side code, that is, computer
programs that are executed on the clients’ browser and allow thus web pages to
be scripted so that their content can change according to the users’ input[40].
The use of these technologies should be controlled and security enhances. APIs
and Web applications that abuse users’ trust (for example by diffusing private
information or automatically executing programmes on behalf of the users)
should be forbidden.
The
same thing should be said for the imperialistic use of Facebook and Twitter.
Governments and IT-research centers should encourage the construction of a
multitude of public social networks and a variety of public search engines, in
order to avoid the risks of the monopoly of information within the hands of few
big actors such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Technologies that are designed to protect users’ epistemic
trust should be encouraged, while those who “free-ride” on the trustful
dispositions of social networks’ users should be sanctioned.
7. Conclusion
I have argued that the trustful attitude that characterizes
social networks users should be balanced by a vigilant attitude of epistemic responsibility not only from the
perspective of the producers of
information, but also from the perspective of consumers of information[41].
We are not condemned to passively trust information crunched by new
technologies of expertise. We still have the means to check whether our
practices of production and acquisition of information are based on reliable
processes, or just on passively accepted social norms or humdrum cognitive
habits. We can always ask ourselves: “Why do I trust a Google search, or a
Harvard University Press book, or an authoritative voice?”
An epistemically
responsible attitude should be encouraged at the individual level and at the
institutional one. We should promote the assessment of credible, open-access
procedures of endorsement of authority. Wikipedia has been a model of
institutionalizing new practices of certification and norms of credibility.
Yet, Wikipedia is itself victim of its success and - as a network effect – its
weight is growing so much that it becomes difficult to contrast its authority
with other similar projects. At an institutional level, a diversity of projects
should be promoted in order to balance these pernicious network effects.
A society of knowledge
is growing in a way that seems incompatible with a growing demand of
open-access, trusted, accountable information. This seems paradoxical, and
fixing the paradox is the first step to regain a coherent image of ourselves as
free epistemic subjects.
[1] . and ,
. (1995),
Disruptive Technologies: Catching the
Wave, «Harvard Business Review»,
73, 1: 43-53
[2]
Hindman, M. (2008), The Myth of Digital
Democracy , Princeton University Press.
[3]
Cf. on this point the recent book edited by Elster; J. & Landemore, H. (2012) Collective Wisdom, Cambridge University
Press.
[4]
Cf. Mark Davis’ (Microsoft) presentation of the EC Onlife Manifesto Initiative, Brussels, February 8th,
2013, accessible at: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/Onlife_Initiative.pdf
[5]
Bohman, J. (2004) Expanding Dialogue.
The Internet, The Public Sphere, and the
Prospects for International Democracy, «The Sociological Review», 52: 131-155.
[7]
Cf. Habermas, J. (1999) Der europäische nationalstaat unter dem
Druck der Globalisierung (Lo Stato Nazione europeo sotto la pressione della
mondializzazione) in Blätter für deutsche
und internationale Politik, 4.
[8] Cf. data on Pew
Internet & American Life Project at: http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Activities-and-Pursuits/Politics.aspx?typeFilter=5
[9]
Cf. for example, Pettit, P. (20) 4,
Reliance, Trust and Internet, “Analyse
& Kritik”, 26: 2004, 108-121. http://analyse-und-kritik.net/en/2004-1/AK_Pettit_2004.pdf
; McGeer, V. (2004) Developing Trust on the Internet, “Analyse
& Kritik”, 26: 2004, 91-107.
[10]
On trust and democracy, cf. Warren, M. E. (1999) (ed.), Democracy and Trust, Cambridge University Press.
Making and Breaking Cooperative
Relations,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
[12] I borrow the expression “from custom to
code” to Rom Harré (1990) Trust and its
surrogates: psychological foundations of political process in Warren (cit.), ch. 8.
[13]
Cf. Warren (cit.) but also Hardin
(ed.) (2004) Distrust, Russell Sage
Foundation, NY.
[14]
Cf. Dwyer, C., Hiltz, S. R., Passerini, K. (2007) Trust and Privacy Concerns within Social networking Sites. A comparison
between Facebook and MySpace,” Proceedings of the Thirteen American
Conference on Information Systems”, Keyston, Colorado 9-12 August.
[15]
Citation in a blog:
http://themaniblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/on-human-rights-on-the-internet/
[16]
See on this point Chris Anderson’s article on the Death of the Web on Wired:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1
[18]
Cf. Grigoriadis, V. (2009) Do you own
Facebook or does Facebook own you?
http://nymag.com/news/features/55878/index2.html
[19]
Cf. Hardin, R. (1992) The Street Level Epistemology of Trust, “Analyse und Kritik”, 14, 154-174.
[20]
Cf. Baier, A. (1986) Trust and Antitrust,
“Ethics”, 96, 231-260; Jones, K. (2012) Trustworthiness,
“Ethics”, 61-85.
[22]
Cf. Hardin, R. (2004) Distrust.
Manifestations and Management in Hardin, H. (ed.) Distrust, Russell Sage Foundation, NY, p. 4.
[23]
McGeer (2004) cit, Pettit (2004) cit.
[24]
Cf. Mindus, P., Greppi, A. Cuono, M. (2011) Legitimacy,
2.0, p. 70, http://uppsala.academia.edu/PatriciaMindus/Books/
[25]
Cf. on this point, Origgi, G. (2002) Per
una scienza cognitiva di Internet
« Sistemi Intelligenti », XIV, n.2, pp. 269-286; Origgi, G. (2003) Ricerche su Internet, “La
Rivista dei Libri”, dicembre.
[26]
Cf. Kleinberg, J. (2000) The Structure of
the Web, “Science”, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/294/5548/1849.summary
[27]
Cf. Morris, M.R., Counts, S. et al. (2012)
Tweeting is Believing? Understanding
Microblog Credibility Perceptions, CSCW
2012, Washington, Seattle, 11-15 February.
[28]
http://googleblog.blogspot.fr/2011/02/update-to-google-social-search.html
[29]
Cf. Cardon, D. (2013) Du lien au like.
Deux mésures de la reputation sur Internet, in Origgi; G. (ed.) La Réputation, COMMUNICATIONS, Seuil,
Paris.
[30] For
the notion of good informant see Craig,
E. (1990) Knowledge and the State of
Nature, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
[31]
Cf. Origgi, G. (2008) A Stance of Trust, in Origgi, G. (2008) A Stance of Trust in María Luisa Mora Millán (ed.) “Estudios en homenaje a José Luis Guijarro Morales”,
Universidad de Cadiz, ISBN 978-84-9828187-3, 187-200.
[32]
Cf. Origgi, G. (2004) Is Trust an
Epistemological Notion? Episteme, 1, 1; G. Origgi (2005) What Does it Mean to Trust in Epistemic Authority?
http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:130569
[33]
Cf. Williams, B. (2002) Truth and
Truthfulness, Princeton UP.
[34]
Cf. Craig cit.
[35]
See. Boyd, R. and Richerson, P.J. (2002) Not
by Genes Alone; Sperber, D. Origgi, G. et
al. (2010) “Epistemic Vigilance”, Mind
and Language, 25, 4, pp. 359-393.
[36]
Cf. Morris, M.R. et al. (2012) (cit.).
[37]
See Origgi, G. (2012) A Social
Epistemology of Reputation, “Social Epistemology”, 26, 399-418.
[38]
For an analysis of indicators see: Davis, K.E., Kingsbury, B. and Merry, S.E.,
(2012) Indicators as a Technology of
Global Governance, “Law and Society Review”, 46, 1, pp. 71-104.
[39]
See for example the Klout score:
www.klout.com
[40]
See Devin, S.M. (2008) Anti-Social
Networking: Exploiting Trusting Environment of Web 2.0, “Network Security”,
11.
[41]
Cf. Origgi, G. (2010) Epistemic Vigilance
and Epistemic Responsibility in the Liquid World of Scientific Publications,
“Social Epistemology”, 24, 3, 149-159; Origgi, G. (2012) Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Trust, “Social Epistemology”, 26, 2, 221-23 .
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