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Social media and e-commerce sites quantify reputational qualities, such as credibility, trustworthiness, status, merit and esteem. Likes, upvotes, friend counts, share counts, reviews and ratings appear in real time, making reputations seem quantifiable, legible, interchangeable, interactive, and actionable. Platforms implement reputation measures to facilitate trust between buyers and sellers, renters and hosts, readers and posts, across highly dispersed, partly anonymous networks. So why do platformed conflicts over reputation proliferate, scaling up to worldwide trashing spectacles and rapid-fire status gains and losses? How is online reputation conflict linked to financial value?  

 

To understand online reputation’s fractiousness, a new approach is needed, which analyses how platforms foment long-standing conflicts over the value of reputation. Online platforms produce a new social-financial condition: they transform reputation into the general opinion – the broad sense that itbecomes possible to view others’ reputations in general, standardized forms, which become productive of a wide array of revenues and rewards. However, despite their standardization and quantification, reputations are far too complex to ever be rendered ‘in general;’ they have long expressed conflicts over the allocation of value to others. The book details four online reputation regimes – the crowd-sourced credibility regime, the microcelebrity regime, the identity regime, and the campaigning regime – and this book charts how online platforms’ standardization and assetization of reputation exacerbates long-standing conflicts over who is deemed valuable and why.   

Emily Rosamond

Emily Rosamond is Senior Lecturer and Head of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. She serves as Editor of the academic journal Finance and Society, and has published widely on financialization, reputation, character and personality in art and digital culture.