The Age of (In)Credibility
Since I posted this story “Verified Trust is the New Currency”. At the time I was considering how mutual admiration and departing from what can be considered gossip may be the best and only way to have confidence in who we deal with and making decisions about business and personal relationships. That was in June of 2016; several months before a huge shift in the value of truth and validation of facts decimated what passed for honesty and conversations that may not have always agreed, but usually had some basis in reality. Are we doomed to wondering what is true forever?
The change in what we consider to be true shifts from day to day as people and reporting organizations change what they say, how much they say, and how much is left out of what they present when explaining a particular event or situation. The situation has deteriorated to the point that news, reporters, and reporting organizations have become suspect with regard to the truthfulness of their reporting. In the opinion of some this is a well deserved decline in the confidence we put in them, and for others it is a tragedy. The overall effect is that the blight that’s been growing on some organizations has spread to all. There seems no way to define what is true, what is false, how much personal or organizational bias has been applied to the story presented, or how the story affects real life.
Are we artibers of our own consumption? We’ve seen how presentation can be skewed through social media and programmatic manipulation of what is presented to each person. For some of us it feels as if there is no way to dive deep enough into the mess of personal opinion, politics, commercial interest, and flat out lies to arrive at some reliable understanding of our world. While the current state of information consumption seems incomprehensible I’m not certain it’s significantly worse than it has been at other times in history or places in the world. The technology we use to create, distribute, and consume information has changed so much that we know more things more quickly than ever before, but because there’s so much volume of inbound information we have to rely on filters to cut down on the overload.
Those filters come in different forms including which TV network, newspaper, social media, or physical social group we pay attention to. But that doesn’t help to distinguish what may be reliable reporting from pure biased propaganda. In my early life I got some advice about believing what I hear from someone else. It went something like, “If you weren’t there to witness the event with your own eyes then you don’t know the truth, and everything report of it is gossip.” I think that’s a fair statement but largely impractical. The best we can do is to have some kind of trust in the people we listen to so as to judge the veracity of what they tell us.
In my earlier post I mentioned efforts like Klout.com, Linkedin.com, self rating sites like Airbnb, and eBay; and some new efforts like Collaboartive lab and Hexalina.io. These all rely on individuals reporting their experiences to create a collective valuation of reliability and truth about someone or some thing. Now Elon Musk is proposing to create “Pravda” as a way for individuals to rate their experience with reporters and news organizations. My opinion is that this is an interesting effort that is well needed. But the details of how it works and whether it accomplishes the stated purpose remain to be seen.
If Pravda is simply Musk’s knee jerk reaction to a wrong he perceived was perpetrated on him and his company it’s likely to fail in its stated objectives. But if he turns it into a real tool that allows individuals to make their own connections with others they trust (maybe based on external trust tools) it may be able to make a dent in wall of anonymous journalism loaded with undisclosed agendas.