Fuente: Life in the fresh lane

Beatriz Sarlo, varias veces citada y comentada aquí, escribe una nota sobre la confiabilidad de la información que existe en internet. Una nota que comienza con un artículo de Gloria Origgi (Diseñando la sabiduría a través de la red: La pasión por el ranking, La vie des idées, en inglés). Bastante sugerentes ambos, en la línea de un texto que también he lanzado por acá, con la Realidad-Google, así que copiaré y pegaré varios párrafos (recomiendo, como siempre la lectura completa de los textos):

That is because the Web has been mainly seen as a disruptive technology whose immediate effect was to blow up all the existing legitimate procedures of knowledge access, thus “empowering” its users with a new intellectual freedom, the liberty to produce, access and distribute content in a totally unregulated way. [...]

My modest epistemological prediction is that the Information Age is being replaced by a Reputation Age in which the reputation of an item – that is how others value and rate the item – is the only way we have to extract information about it. This passion of ranking is a central feature of collective wisdom. James Surowiecki imposes a very illuminating list of conditions on the characterisation of a wise crowd. Not any crowd is a wise crowd. In order to avoid well known phenomena such as group polarization, information cascades, conformism, a group must display certain features that make it a potentially intelligent entity. Suriowiecki proposes four main characteristics: 1. diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information) 2. independence (people’s opinions are not determined by others) 3. decentralization (people are able to draw on local knowledge) 4.aggregation (presence of mechanisms that turn individual judgements in collective decisions). I’m tempted to add a fifth one that is for me crucial especially in order to “speed up” the collective filtering of information: 5. presence of a rating device (each person should be able to produce a rating hierarchy, rely on past ranking systems and make – at least in some circumstances – his or her rating available to other persons). [...]

The Web is an “aristocratic” network – an expression that is used by the social network theorists – that is, a network in which “rich get richer” and the more links you receive the higher is the probability that you will receive even more. This disparity of weights creates a “reputational landscape” that informs the result of a query. The PageRank algorithm is nourished by the local knowledge and preferences of each individual user and it influences them by displaying a ranking of results that are interpreted as a hierarchy of relevance. Note that this system is NOT a knowledge management system: the PageRank algorithm doesn’t know anything about the particular pattern of activities of each individual: it doesn’t know how many times you and I go to the JSTOR website and doesn’t combine our navigation paths together. [...]

Even Wikipedia, which doesn’t display any explicit rating device, works on the following principle: if an entry has survived on the site – that is, it has not been erased by other wikipedians – it is worth reading it. This can be a too weak evaluative tool, and, as I said, discussion goes on these days on the opportunity to introduce more structured filtering devices on Wikipedia , but it is my opinion that the survival or even egalitarian projects like Wikipedia depends on their capacity to incorporate a ranking: the label Wikipedia in itself works already as a reputational cue that orients the choices of the users. Without the reputation of the label, the success of the project would be much more limited. (Designing wisdom through the Web, Gloria Origgi)

Sarlo explora un poco más esto y comenta que:

“Internet es aristocrática porque en ella los ricos siempre se vuelven más ricos: cuantas más visitas tenga una página, más visitas tendrá en el futuro y más arriba aparecerá en la tabla de posiciones. Al proceso de hacerse cada vez más rico yo lo llamaría acumulación ampliada de capital digital.” (¿Cómo sé que es cierto? Lo leí por internet, Beatriz Sarlo).

Más: Agarra el rebote (Bloodyhell)

perútags: google ranking page-rank aristocracia cibercultura redes-sociales conocimiento beatriz-sarlo gloria-origgi wikipedia