Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.22.06 | In what ways do digital technologies themselves affect credibility? I think the essential consequence is of increasing the diversity of credibility signals (both positive and negative, clarifying and obscuring). And at two levels—that of credibility of the content (whether a posting or about a person) and the credibility of the medium itself.

Online links/citations, background searchers, web of science, google scholar, recommender system, automatic sorting by date of posting, blog tags, social networking systems, and more, all offer both features and indicators about credibility of content and people.

But of course there are massive sets of “hits”, ability of anyone to post information of any level of accuracy, anonymity and pseudonymity (which can foster both improved as well as decreased credibility), fraud, deception, false signs of credibility, etc. The sheer massiveness and totality of Internet resources probably represent a signal of credibility itself to many people—“I found it on the Internet”—and not being on the Internet (not listed in [at least first page results] in a google search, on a person’s social networking page, not linked to, etc.) are taken as indicators of low credibility.

It’s possible that one of the main effects is to expand the dimensionality and contexts of credibility. Not that there weren’t always different dimensions and contexts, but now there are so many forms and dimensions that perhaps we have to develop new concepts.