ThinkStock PhotosBy Shubhranshu Singh
The process by which all brands find their relative place in the ever shifting social world of consumer esteem is hard to understand. It is a world all brands precariously and inescapably inhabit.
A brand can never fully control its reputational levers. However, every brand has a reputation which it must confront. Today, we live in a world of data rich transparency. Everything has a rating. Everybody seems to be checking the rating for everything. Yet brand reputations are now more difficult to build than at any point in time in the past and more information is seemingly leading only to more confusion.
When we first come into contact with new information or new domains of knowledge, we are reliant on others. This reliance extends to accessing facts, opinions, values, biases and preferences of others. Internet technologies have made it easy and tempting for any novice to venture boldly into new domains of knowledge. It is often forgotten that the prejudices, prejudgements and sampling weights of many others make up our mind.
With the explosion of information, we are now moving towards an age where information will be valued only once it is filtered, evaluated, rated and commented upon by others.
It means collectivism will reign supreme.
This paradigm is quite striking in the case of the web because it represents a radical transformation in our access of knowledge. It is changing the forms, domains and ways in which knowledge is acquired.
Let me explain – today, we have the extraordinary ability to collect, synthesise and list centralised information in order to achieve knowledge outcomes.
Search engines, Wikipedia entries, e-commerce transaction ratings, social judgement on social media networks -these are not all genuine collective intelligence system but rather a commercialised , worked upon retrieval system – using algorithms based on ranking, weightage or ‘sheer paid bias’ in fetching and presenting ‘facts’ to us.
I don’t think -as a society- we have taken information design issues as seriously as we have treated privacy.
Information design can camouflage the inherent bias in the system and mask its potential misuse. This is a whole area of critical importance called epistemic vigilance.
We must have a system which preserves diversity of information, values its independence such that people’s opinions need not be determined by others and fosters decentralisation such that people are able to draw upon local knowledge.
Aggregation should not become a rating device because every person’s rating is unique. There is no reason to assume that collectivism produces wiser results.
In an information dense environment, where brands rely on paid media to compete in attracting attention ,what is the relevance of collective wisdom? Isn’t this corpus of knowledge far from the ideal knowledge which stems from objective evaluations or judgement of few experts? Are best selling and best- the same thing ?
We have an epistemic obligation to ensure that we investigate the means by which a reputational process is arriving at results. What are its methods for aggregating individual choices? What are the possible biases that the system may have in its design?
This is important as billions of people make trillions of dollars of decisions based on habit and retrieval from intelligent systems. While there is a hue and cry about artificial intelligence there seems to be very poor understanding of ‘technologically mediated human intelligence’.
The internet is not serving merely a cognitive function – namely to retrieve information – but also a social function in organising this information in various types of classifications that then becomes the basis for culture. This is ‘Meta Memory’.
This Meta memory system has been commercialised because the actions of digital citizens leave addresses and traces in the system ,which are then reusable like a track left on the ground. These tracks then become highways of traffic and reflect in the ranks that inform and influence future preferences and actions in turn. Unlike a library , this is wisdom out of commercial algorithms. This difference is supremely important.
What we think of as a hierarchy of relevance is not so. It is merely informing you of a process output. The main question is - what’s the process!?
The biases built into search engines should become a major subject of discussion, scrutiny and even controversy.
Awareness of such bias should dictate a social enforcement of search practices well.
It is not about greater market share or deeper profit. Ultimately, it is about tendentious information and the sanctity of knowledge and expertise itself I hope technology will not fail us and we will continue to improve innovative and more democratic ways of gaining knowledge and shaping decisions. .
The author is global head for brand and marketing at Royal Enfield. Views expressed are personal.
The process by which all brands find their relative place in the ever shifting social world of consumer esteem is hard to understand. It is a world all brands precariously and inescapably inhabit.
A brand can never fully control its reputational levers. However, every brand has a reputation which it must confront. Today, we live in a world of data rich transparency. Everything has a rating. Everybody seems to be checking the rating for everything. Yet brand reputations are now more difficult to build than at any point in time in the past and more information is seemingly leading only to more confusion.
When we first come into contact with new information or new domains of knowledge, we are reliant on others. This reliance extends to accessing facts, opinions, values, biases and preferences of others. Internet technologies have made it easy and tempting for any novice to venture boldly into new domains of knowledge. It is often forgotten that the prejudices, prejudgements and sampling weights of many others make up our mind.
With the explosion of information, we are now moving towards an age where information will be valued only once it is filtered, evaluated, rated and commented upon by others.
It means collectivism will reign supreme.
This paradigm is quite striking in the case of the web because it represents a radical transformation in our access of knowledge. It is changing the forms, domains and ways in which knowledge is acquired.
Let me explain – today, we have the extraordinary ability to collect, synthesise and list centralised information in order to achieve knowledge outcomes.
Search engines, Wikipedia entries, e-commerce transaction ratings, social judgement on social media networks -these are not all genuine collective intelligence system but rather a commercialised , worked upon retrieval system – using algorithms based on ranking, weightage or ‘sheer paid bias’ in fetching and presenting ‘facts’ to us.
I don’t think -as a society- we have taken information design issues as seriously as we have treated privacy.
Information design can camouflage the inherent bias in the system and mask its potential misuse. This is a whole area of critical importance called epistemic vigilance.
We must have a system which preserves diversity of information, values its independence such that people’s opinions need not be determined by others and fosters decentralisation such that people are able to draw upon local knowledge.
Aggregation should not become a rating device because every person’s rating is unique. There is no reason to assume that collectivism produces wiser results.
In an information dense environment, where brands rely on paid media to compete in attracting attention ,what is the relevance of collective wisdom? Isn’t this corpus of knowledge far from the ideal knowledge which stems from objective evaluations or judgement of few experts? Are best selling and best- the same thing ?
We have an epistemic obligation to ensure that we investigate the means by which a reputational process is arriving at results. What are its methods for aggregating individual choices? What are the possible biases that the system may have in its design?
This is important as billions of people make trillions of dollars of decisions based on habit and retrieval from intelligent systems. While there is a hue and cry about artificial intelligence there seems to be very poor understanding of ‘technologically mediated human intelligence’.
The internet is not serving merely a cognitive function – namely to retrieve information – but also a social function in organising this information in various types of classifications that then becomes the basis for culture. This is ‘Meta Memory’.
This Meta memory system has been commercialised because the actions of digital citizens leave addresses and traces in the system ,which are then reusable like a track left on the ground. These tracks then become highways of traffic and reflect in the ranks that inform and influence future preferences and actions in turn. Unlike a library , this is wisdom out of commercial algorithms. This difference is supremely important.
What we think of as a hierarchy of relevance is not so. It is merely informing you of a process output. The main question is - what’s the process!?
The biases built into search engines should become a major subject of discussion, scrutiny and even controversy.
Awareness of such bias should dictate a social enforcement of search practices well.
It is not about greater market share or deeper profit. Ultimately, it is about tendentious information and the sanctity of knowledge and expertise itself I hope technology will not fail us and we will continue to improve innovative and more democratic ways of gaining knowledge and shaping decisions. .
The author is global head for brand and marketing at Royal Enfield. Views expressed are personal.
