I agree that the Internet is a bit of a Wild West right now when it comes to identity and impersonation. But if somebody really cares about being not-impersonated, they can easily set up a more visible authentic presence that overshadows the fake one.

LeVar Burton (the actor who portrayed Geordi LaForge and Kunta Kinte) is a great example. He was impersonated on Twitter. So, spurred on by his former castmate Wil Wheaton, he went on Twitter himself and also started a blog. He easily proved it was him. And when somebody posted a comment under Levar’s name on a Network World blog recently, we knew it was really him — because he’d direct-messaged me about it from his authenticated Twitter account.

The top eight or so hits on my name on Google are for sites I pretty much control. The same figure for you is about seven. At your or my level of celebrity and/or perceived authority, impersonation simply is not a problem.

Admittedly, the challenge of fighting off impersonators is harder for people who have no other online presence, as per http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29625. But that’s not really germane to the discussion about journalism, news organizations, and/or their replacements. Clear internet identities are established; they make and communicate judgments about each other’s credibility; and the whole system muddles through.

Your point about people TEMPORARILY believing bogus “news” is harder to refute. However, what’s the harm, as long as the errors are quickly corrected? Oh, I can think of lots of theoretical harm if the situation keeps getting worse. But I think instead it will get better, as the Internet continues to mature.

Thanks for the great commentary!

CAM

When Famed Twitter Friend Proves Faux
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032703509.html

And there was this piece a month ago:

Confessions of a Facebook Social Climber
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123569857063289235.html

But there are a lot of issues.

First, it’s far too easy to spoof people. For example, I could go around the blogosphere posting comments as you, and do real damage if I were subtle enough not to be detected as an obvious impostor. You might try to track all of the fake posts down, but frankly the blogosphere–and the web in general–is not set up to protect people from this sort of defamation attack. Indeed, much of what you read online has to be presumed anonymous.

Second, people are lazy, and web search engines encourage them to stay that way. For example, many informational searches lead to Wikipedia pages, and the accuracy of Wikipedia pages depends heavily on their exposure. I recall a bogus Wikipedia entry on “active intelligence” that had been up for months before I noticed it and then recommended it for deletion (which then happened almost instantly). I helped (and got my blog readers to help) clean up a number of entries related to search, which had suffered similar rot.

But of course this last story also supports your argument–my self-interest actually led me to contribute to collective good. And, if I’d crossed the line, others would have had (and still have) the opportunity to push back.

Will the Wikipedia model of negotiated truth work for the information ecosystem as a whole? It’s a nice idea. But I think it only works on Wikipedia because, over time, problems get fixed. For an instant news cycle, such corrections would be too late to have much effect. In fact, we see already that bad reporting is almost impossible to undo, because first impressions are indelible.

Good point that part of reputation is scale. If one has a lot to lose by selling out, then one may be correctly perceived as unlikely to do so.

But what replaces that is a different scale — the scale of the internet. Lots of individually less convincing arguments for somebody’s credibility can, on a whole, add up.

Example — I have detractors. I have people who have economic incentives to diminish my perceived credibility. But if you Google on my name or company name or blog names, you’ll find a little bit of nasty disagreement and zero substantiated claims of integrity problems. In such cases, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence — if I’d done things badly wrong, somebody would surely have gleefully pointed them out.

Still, there’s a long way from the current ecosystem to one where everything is caveat lector. People may claim to be skeptical, but the reality is that they often do believe what they read, e.g. http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/09/15/information-accountability/

And one of the best ways for me to trust an information provider is to know where his or her bread is buttered. When I pay for information products and services, I can reasonably expect that the provider is acting in my interests. When I don’t pay, I should reasonably wonder in whose interests the provider is acting, and how well those interests align with my own.

I worry about a cultural shift towards a model where it’s much more expensive–and perhaps even impossible because of the diminished market–to pay for trusted information because there’s no economy of scale. Still, I can see how such an eventuality may be inevitable if the ease of digital reproduction makes everything either free or custom.

One key point is that many people have BS filters in place already. The style and focus of cynicism has changed, but recent young generations are no less skeptical than the famed early Baby Boomers of the 60s. In many ways they’re even more skeptical.

Yes, many people are trapped in the Limbaugh/Faux News echo chamber. But if they do talk with anybody outside it, those acquaintances have tons of persuasive counter-resources to expose them to. And all it takes is a link — you don’t need to persuade them to change newspaper subscriptions, change preferred news channels, whatever.

There are several paths whereby somebody might come to regard me as trustworthy. They might read my work, show how I present multiple sides of an issue, see my explicit disclosures, etc., etc. (But only if I write clearly enough that they think I know what I’m saying, and that I didn’t try to slip something past them.)

Or they might generally take a note of my personal style, decide I’m honest, look at my credentials, decide I know what I’m talking about, etc.

Or they might rely on reflected credibility from the press who quote me, the multiple competing vendors who point to me, the search engine results pages that summarize all that, etc.

Or it could be any combination of the above.

And oh by the way, they might decide I am highly trustworthy in some areas, but in over my head or simply mistaken in others.

Taken together, that all seems to suffice.

Am I confident that my own business model will hold up in its present form? Not at all. If the industry ever settles into a boring oligopoly the way it appeared to be doing a few years ago, my revenue from small vendors will plummet, and I’ll need to make some sort of change to replace that. (And hence my pro-active attempts to seed growth in user consulting even before I really need that.) But the financial and psychic incentives will always be there for SOMEBODY — and indeed enough “somebodies” — to step forward and fill in the gaps so that the community isn’t too underinformed or misled.

CAM