eastwikkers

A Simple Deception

Another deception is getting play in this New York Times article (as noted in GMSV today). The problem this time is with Wikipedia. In short, a respected editor who used the name Essjay and was supposedly a tenured professor of religion at a private university and an expert in canon law turns out to be a 24-year-old who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and apparently has no relevant degree.

Most curious, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales initially defended Essjay, accepting the editor’s claim that he’d hidden his identity to protect himself from reprisals for mediating disputes between Wikipedia contributors. According to the NYT article, Wales also stated that the editor “is now, and has always been, an excellent editor with an exemplary track record.” Wales later reversed himself saying that his “past support of Essjay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on,” which really doesn’t at all explain his initial defense or his reversal.

Protecting ourselves by hiding our identity can sometimes be a smart thing to do, and anonymity is often debated in PR. But anonymity is not the same as deception. If I reveal I’ve chosen not to disclose my identity, then it’s up to readers to choose whether or not to take me as credible. I haven’t deceived anyone. Wikipedia’s Essjay lied about his credentials, pretending to have experiences he never had in order to assume a position of authority. The difference is huge, and it’s hard to see what part of this Wales didn’t get immediately.

And what about lying about one’s identity for career advancement? George Eliot? I don’t think so. Actually it’s closer to the fraud perpetrated by Stephen Glass. Essjay was not writing fiction. He was pretending to be an authority on religion, and he used that authority to mediate arguments. Even if Essjay is as knowledgeable about religion as a tenured professor, his readers should have known the truth about what that knowledge was based on.

This deception sits at the heart of social media and our online interactions. How can we ever know that a person or company we encounter on the Internet is honestly represented?  Initially, we can’t. In the offline world, eye contact, a handshake, a feeling we get when we enter a building all help, but even with these, we are often deceived. As more and more of our lives are conducted online, we’ll need to develop new ways of sensing deception, whether through new technology or through social media mechanisms that allow us to get feedback from the crowd – some of these are already emerging (though how can we be sure they are legit?).

The ramifications for PR are clear. Our weapons against a heightened fear of being deceived – and its consequence, cynicism – are more transparency and less hype, a lesson that needs to be passed on to clients as well.

Thinking About the Future and Happy About It

I started writing a post that drew rather depressing conclusions based on connecting (well, associating at any rate) news in InfoWorld that “Yahoo Inc. is researching areas such as microeconomics to help it better understand the behavior of users, or of advertisers in areas such as keyword auctions” with comments by Jaron Lanier, who voiced some justifiable concerns in “Digital Maoism” and now concludes “Beware the Online Collective” with:

“What’s to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It’s amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It’s time to think about that power on a moral basis.” [There’s more to the article than this, so check it out]

Then I read this:

“Paradoxically, one of the biggest reasons for being optimistic is that there are systemic flaws in the reported world view. Certain types of news — for example dramatic disasters and terrorist actions — are massively over-reported, others — such as scientific progress and meaningful statistical surveys of the state of the world — massively under-reported.

“Although this leads to major problems such as distortion of rational public policy and a perpetual gnawing fear of apocalypse, it is also reason to be optimistic. Once you realize you're being inadvertently brainwashed to believe things are worse than they are, you can... with a little courage... step out into the sunshine.”

It’s by Chris Anderson and appears in The Edge Annual Question 2007. The question is “What are you optimistic about?” and the 160 responses (I have yet to get through them all) are often encouraging. It can be hard to look at current trends – the environment, population growth, pandemics, politics and religion, and, yes, algorithmically fueled mass online activity, and remain all that sanguine about the future, so it’s great to see these impressive thinkers immersed in the power of positive thinking. Of course, the question was phrased to elicit some kind of optimistic response. It doesn’t ask if the respondents are on the whole optimistic about the future. Anyway, I’m going to use up a little of that courage, get back to coverage of CES, and see if there’s a new toy I can’t live without.

 

Trust and Deception

In 2003, the prescient William Gibson published Pattern Recognition, a novel about a group obsessing over and trying to discover the source of some mysterious video clips trickling out onto the Internet. This year, the Lonely Girl video series appeared on YouTube, causing a similar frenzy and turning out to be the work of a screenwriter, filmmaker, and hired actress. We also had the fake Wal-Mart blog and the fake Beer Ape commercial.  And the Jason Fortuny and Craigslist episode – publishing the responses to a fake personals ad – raised further questions about credibility, deception, privacy and abuse on the net.

So how long before algorithm-controlled deceptions actually destroy a company or bring down a candidate – or get one elected? In a world where you can’t believe what you read or watch, how do we make informed decisions? 

Even in pre-Internet/pre-digital photo days, documents and photos could be faked, personal information could be stolen, and private letters could be photocopied and passed around to create a scandal. And a well-placed lie could always be spread to harm candidates and companies. We used to trust (not always with good reason) our local newspaper editors and favorite newscasters to sort out the truth, and brick-and-mortar stores that had longevity not to cheat us.

But today, the problem is on a much larger scale, much faster, and more complicated. So now we seek trusted sources on the net.  Many of us rely on the online versions of our trusted off-line resources for both news and shopping. But how do we develop trust in valuable online resources, from auction and travel sites to bloggers, that have no offline equivalents?

Does it depend on personal time spent and testing the waters? Does it come from the type of community formed? Word-of-mouth? How have you developed trust? We’re curious. Let us know.

Business Week on the New Web

Wonderful special issue coming next week, with articles on the leaders of the new Web, Ajax, tagging (why markerters love it), the power of participatory sites (with very cool snapshots of companies like Pandora and Postsecret ), and blogging in education (a new interest of ours).  Main story quotes Ross Mayfield, CEO at Socialtext, an Eastwick partner and client:

"'The Web isn't so much a place anymore', explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It's more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, 'They Google (GOOG ), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs'

"I'd Like to Teach the World to Teach"

Interesting experiment going on at IBM -- program for helping exiting IBM employees to become teachers.  Reminds me again that companies this size can do amazing things simply because they are so big.  Remember their blogging initiative.