<nettime-ann> IERI cfp: Reputation the Cyberworld

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

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Call for Papers: Reputation in the Cyberworld
http://www.i-r-i-e.net/call_for_papers_19.htm

Reputation is a very familiar phenomenon. Your reputation is who you  
are held to be by others; it is your social standing. A good  
reputation is helpful for getting through life, and, in one sense or  
another, is indispensable for rising through the social ranks. For  
some career paths, notoriety may actually boost your standing in the  
world. Your reputation precedes you as the information or narrative in  
circulation about who you have been, so there is an undeniable  
connection to the temporal dimension of the past. Your very identity  
is tied to the reputation you have established or ruined in your  
personal social world.

In business transactions reputation can play a crucial role,  
especially where credit is required to finance them. A creditor has to  
trust a potential debtor, thus giving him credit in the double sense.  
Whether we trust each other in any kind of social interplay depends on  
each other's reputations in circulation that have come to our ears.  
Reputations apply to both natural and juridical persons. Any corporate  
entity will be jealous of its reputation because it has a direct link  
to commercial success. The growing phenomenon of Corporate Social  
Responsibility evidences how important a company's standing in the  
community and society has become, including for the bottom line.  
Companies' reputations have long since been drawn into political  
struggles over fair corporate practices.

The internet has been a game-changer in opening up an entirely new,  
artificial, digital world - the cyberworld - in which reputations of  
persons and companies circulate, reified as bit-strings. Your very  
identity - who you are - is today tied to bit-strings in circulation  
that have some connection to your proper name. Hence the desire of  
some to hide their identity in the cyberworld by means of pseudonyms  
or anonymization, whereas for others, the cyberworld provides an  
unprecedented opportunity for showing off who they are and launching  
their reputation more widely, even worldwide. The ease with which bit- 
strings relating to personal identity can be brought into circulation  
in the global digital matrix allows reputations and even fame to be  
promoted without the backing of specific media corporations. These  
used to function as gatekeepers who assessed whose reputation was  
worthy of dissemination and whose was not. Similarly, companies now  
employ the cyberworld to advertise not just products and services, but  
to promote who they are. Even name- or brand-recognition is a vital  
component of commercial success. Only because company names and brands  
are intimately linked to reputation are they so jealously guarded. The  
cyberworld opens a new arena for debating companies' reputations and  
social standing.

We welcome empirical and theoretical papers that analyze from some  
chosen ethical angle the phenomena of personal and corporate  
reputation  in connection with today's ever-encroaching cyberworld.  
Potential topics/questions include:

	• How does digitized reputation relate to 'normal' reputation? to  
human freedom? to truth? to rhetoric?
	• Will the loss of digitized reputation, or the failure to establish  
one, amount to a kind of social death, of social non-existence in our  
brave new cyberworld?
	• Is the possibility - and thus power - of talking about someone in  
the third person a fundamental form of social violence and of the  
ineluctable social power play?
	• How is the striving to establish a reputation related to the will  
to power?
	• How can reputation be damaged by and how can it be protected  
against slander, libel, calumny, rumour and the like? How are these  
latter  phenomena to be characterized? Are only legal means available  
to protect reputation?
	• How are personal reputation and corporate reputation different?
	• Do online social media enhance or impede, further or endanger the  
establishment of personal reputation?
	• Do pseudonyms in the cyberworld (legitimately?) enable flexible and/ 
or multiple reputations - versatile plays with masks of identity?
	• How does reputation provide a lever for achieving a fair power play  
in civil society?
	• Who has control over my reputation in the cyberworld, if bit- 
strings 'never die' and companies gather and store my personal digital  
trace? Is my cyber-reputation inescapable?
	• How do companies' strategies to establish and enhance reputation  
via Corporate Social Responsibility offer also a point of attack in  
the power play of civil society to make companies change corporate  
policies and practices?
	• Can public debate in the cyberworld over a company's reputation  
serve to constrain corporate practices in lieu of legal frameworks  
that have trouble being enforced on a global level?
	• How does the phenomenon of reputation change across cultures and  
how do the rules of play for establishing or losing reputation shift?

Guest Editor:

Dr. Michael Eldred
artefact text & translation, Cologne, Germany
Member of the project Internet Privacy  A Culture of Privacy and  
Trust for the Internet acatech, Berlin, Germany
af03@arte-fact.org

For further information, especially on deadlines and how to submit a  
paper, please refer to: Reputation in the Cyberworld - Call for Papers  
cfp-pdf-fulltext (30 KB) (right click and select "Save Target As").




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