Reputation Warfare

What do platforms do to reputation, by making it so widely fought for?

Online platforms are theatres of reputation conflict. YouTube celebrity standoffs, Amazonreview bombing missions, adulation waves and shame-storms… These events, in their countless variations, permeate e-commerce sites and social media discourse. What do platforms do to reputation, by making it so widely fought for?  

Many commentators have celebrated online reputation’s potential, lamented its violence, or studied its effects within specific arenas. This book looks more broadly, considering howonline reputation reshapes long-standing conflicts over who, and what, is valued within western capitalist societies.

Through four chapters – on crowd-sourced credibility, microcelebrity, identity, and campaigning – Rosamond explores how online platforms extend historical conflicts over reputation within capitalism. As platforms make reputation seem more abstract, votable, andvaluable than ever before, they also make reputations more volatile. They inaugurate reputational volatility as a widespread orientation of public life.

Reputation is the aesthetic expression of the value ascribed to someone or something. It has long been a hinge between financial values, social life, and cultural expression. To understand the politics of online reputation, we must consider how platforms stage the volatility of reputations, and aestheticize conflict as reputation conflict.

 

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.