Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Reputation, Trash and the Future of Choices
A couple weeks ago, Google released a new dashboard service that lets people know when they have been mentioned, for better or worse, by someone else on the Internet. It's the automated version of googling oneself--and it underscores an idea that seems to be gaining a lot of traction, namely that we are increasingly understanding reputation as a form of currency.
The excellent Venessa Meimes sums up the argument as something like this:
The title they gave my presentation was “Reputation as Currency,” which seemed to be an unwelcome concept.
After the screening, I said that I hoped the video might spark people’s thinking about the expanding definition of currency, and how reputation and online identity were evolving to become currencies in and of themselves, and in turn how personal data was becoming a new asset class.
The idea was that if the everyday non-techie person could imagine their online information as a currency or “money,” they would begin to wake up to the fact that this is very valuable information that they should demand as their right to own. It’s a step.
It's probably worth stepping back and parsing this, because there's a significant difference between the value of reputation and the value of data. Reputation has, at some level, always been a form of currency--and is an incredibly valuable form of currency right now. For example, decisions about mortgages, car loans, and all sorts of other things are determined by credit score--or, in other words, your financial reputation. What is changing, I think, is that we are increasingly recognizing that personal data says something about us, and, as a result, we need to manage and cultivate reputation, rather than leaving it to chance.
It's easy to see just how controversial this idea will be, however, in a demo project to bring transparency to something most of us try to hide: Our garbage habits. The project, called Bin Cam, developed by a group of researchers from New Castle University in the U.K. According to the BBC, the project worked like this:
Imagine your friends being able to examine every item in your kitchen bin. The food waste, the treats you buy and the brands you use.
That is exactly what a group of students are subjecting themselves to in Newcastle....
Everything the students throw into their bin is caught on camera and automatically uploaded to Facebook as part of an environmental challenge.
If there is anything in there that could be recycled, they will lose points and slide down the league table of participants. Worse still, they could be shamed by their friends.
Not surprisingly, were mixed. Actual garbage output was down, while, in contrast, one critic of the concept described posting our garbage output onto Facebook as "hitting people with a stick." This sort of image streaming could be used to help us eat healthier and waste less--we'll just all need to put up with some social coercion to get there.
While this was a pilot research project, my sense is that, in the next decade, we'll be increasingly living in a world where even things like digital evidence of our trash will be tracked and available. A recent Wired article, for example, highlighted the ways in which the declining costs of sensors are making it dirt cheap to track things as simple as toothbrushing habits, and as a result, we should expect to find ourselves in a world where even mundane details, like trash output and dental hygiene, become little bits of data that constitute this increasingly important form of value known as reputation.