What Are Digital Reputation Measures Worth? The Rise and Fall of Reputation Metrics on Social Media
Résumé
The notion of digital reputation has continuously and insistently accompanied the rise of social media during the 2005-2012 period. Supported by a convergent set of discourses, interests and devices, the ambition that fed the development of the social web was to record the circulation of influence by considering that each node of the social network (i.e. the “digital identities” that appear on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn pages) have a different reputation and that these differences can be measured. The digital reputation of Internet users has appeared as a new and specific way of providing value to people and digital information. The aim of this article is to set up an overview of this promise ten years after its birth. Reputation meters has appeared so contextual, relational and manipulable that it has not been possible to provide interpretive conventions that are sufficiently stable to coordinate and redefine actors’ activities. The e-reputation is local and reluctant to any standardization operation. In this article, we would like to show that when faced with the multiple uncertainties encountered by fragile reputation measures, service designers tend increasingly to neglect this mode of valuation in favor of popularity and personalized prediction.