Significant News and Trends, November 2004

As of November 2004, I have observed the following important trends that I feel either directly impact skeptical business research or are likely to have a spillover effect on how you evaluate business information on the Web:

1. Trend: The accelerating decrease in trust of all types of media and news sources by the general public, particularly by the younger generation.

Commentary/Implication: One result is an increasing phenomenon in which an information user’s definition of credibility is “if a source agrees with me, then it is trustworthy”! There is an accompanying decline in the value of “objectivity” and “neutrality” in an information and news source, and a rise in the value of “transparency.” While this trend is going to have the greatest impact on the consumer and popular news media area, we may need to watch for any spillover into the professional research area too, particularly as younger people move into the workplace.

2. Trend: The increasing influence and higher profile of blogs, including their impact on mainstream media. The influence of blogs has been building over the past several months, and this form of communication has achieved certain milestones, including the credentialing of bloggers to cover the 2004 Democratic convention, and the bloggers’ role in exposing the fraudulent memos in the 60 Minutes Dan Rather investigation of President George W. Bush’s National Guard record.

Commentary/Implication:  As certain bloggers gain influence and credibility, their opinions and analysis will increasingly be used as a legitimate information source by business researchers.  This will raise greater concerns over credibility and reliability of such sources.

3. Trend: Popularity = Credibility. Bloggers that have many incoming links and are cited by others increase their influence and, in a perpetual cycle, become cited even more by others; therefore they appear closer to the top of search engine results, which rank sites and bloggers by incoming links. One result of this phenomenon is that credibility is becoming, de facto, defined by a blogger’s popularity.

Commentary/Implications: What does it mean when popularity, as defined by a larger group, determines credibility? Many argue that large groups of people, in the long run, are “smarter” and can make better decisions. Two prominent books that explore this phenomenon of group intelligence are Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold and The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.  This perspective is also a guiding principle of the growing “participatory journalism” movement, in which readers help create the news, particularly on online news sites. While the value of the “group mind” appears to be valid, at the same time, relying on group decisions raises real issues about what happens when the group is wrong or manipulated. I plan to cover this issue in some detail in the next update of this site.

4. Trend: Corporate reputation management. Companies are beginning to recognize the value and importance of “influential bloggers” in determining word of mouth about one’s companies and products on the Web.

Commentary/Implication: As more and more companies actively monitor what is being said about them on the Web, I see an increased likelihood of conflicts of interests and co-opting of certain bloggers, who unlike traditional journalists, are not obligated to comply with an institutional or even professional code of ethics. This is likely to eventually cause a blogger scandal, when it is determined that certain influential bloggers are surreptitiously working for some political or commercial interest.

5. Trend: Explosion of user-created and disseminated content. More and more Internet users are passionately, creatively, and imaginatively publishing material on an enormous amount of topics, and then making their work available to the entire Internet community, via the “RSS technology” that is discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 7 of the book.

Commentary/Implication: This explosion in user-created and disseminated content means an ever increasing availability of more obscure and niche information, which is a plus for researchers of all kinds. However it also accentuates the need for methods for evaluating information credibility on the Web. It also greatly increases the problem of information overload, despite the variety of tools being developed to deal with this issue, which more often than not, make the problem worse, not better.