Popularity v. Quality: Assessing Information Quality in a Commercialized Internet
Comments: 4 - Date: October 30th, 2008 - Categories: Information Quality
In some ways, the Internet is a giant popularity contest. Worth is assessed by Google PageRank – a formula based primarily on how many people link to a site. Every news site prominently displays the most read, most commented, most e-mailed stories. Social news sites such as Digg, reddit, and del.icio.us exist as an aggregation of what is popular around the web. Another level up, PopUrls serves as an aggregator of aggregators, displaying all the most popular headlines from other news-sharing sites.
There is a collective fixation on what is most popular, with the assumption that what is popular is also most worthy. Websites that show up on the first page of a Google search are more reliable than those on subsequent pages. There’s good reason for this kind of trust in popularity. Unlike the days when information was controlled by few hands in just a few media channels, the Internet is an incredibly democratizing medium, where both the barriers to entry and costs of participation are low. If you build it, they will come. The cream will eventually rise to the top. Popularity, then, can be become a shorthand for quality.
Now that social media has been a buzz word for a while, marketing companies have scrambled to exploit these principles. Advertising in the form of pop-ups and banner ads still abounds, but the savviest marketing mimics viral popularity. Whatever mistrust we may harbor toward corporate advertising, our guard comes down a little in social media. The Internet is perhaps the most democratic media platform we have ever had, it is still not a level playing field. A part of digital literacy is the ability to distinguish what has genuinely risen to the top and what has been inflated by outside influences. Popularity, then, is not always the most reliable metric for quality.
A particularly timely example in this week leading up to the election is astroturfing. Accusations of astroturfing, or formal PR campaigns that aim to give the impression of grassroots movements, have been thrown around by both the McCain and Obama campaigns. Nebulous definition aside, Astroturfing is difficult to prove, but it’s also fairly spot something fishy. A public relations firm after all, no matter how well staffed, can’t really imitate the organic interactions of a real grassroots movement.
This kind of behavior isn’t limited to political campaigns of course. When it was revealed last year that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey had spent at least seven years posting under a pseudonym on Yahoo Finance forums, in which he pretended to be an unbiased third-party and posted critical comments about a rival company that Whole Foods was looking to buy, there was a collective outrage online. There is something particularly odious is this way of gaming the system that seems to go against the principles of the Internet.
There is also, of course, the entire industry of search engine optimization. The point is that the popularity game, is in fact a game. In social media, quantity can become synonymous with quality. Post count, number of followers, incoming links – these are the numbers that govern the game. The most popular lists can also be facile and rather unvaried. Explore a little. There’s a whole world out there. Randomize, and no, the I’m Feeling Lucky button doesn’t count.
-Sarah Zhang
Comment by Paul Kawachi - October 31, 2008 @ 8:32 pm
In education, the challenge is to achieve high quality, widest access, and at affordable cost. We are already aware therefore that wide access (popularity) is not equivalent to high quality. However some universities might spend vast amounts of money on public relations and indeed publishing – which increase its own popularity ranking. Would a rich corporate CEO not donate to the alma mater to get it to the top rank ? Having the people think a place is, has or offers the best quality does not necessarily mean it is the best quality. So then how are we to judge quality, if not by the numbers game – how many first-class degrees did they award last year, how many professors do they have, how many publications do they have ? Even small-town college may offer a student the highest quality education available in the world, despite the lack in sports facilities and congenial student bodies. Leading educationalists around the world suggest that outsourcing examinations to some supra-institutional examination and accrediting agency is a key and at least part of the solution. Colleges and universities would then be on a much more level playing field, and students would feel much more at ease in shopping around for courses they need and can afford to learn from to pass the examination. The second part of the solution would then be to provide free access to open educational resources globally – naturally tagged for ease in access. Together these measures would ensure widest possible open access (quantity) at the highest accredited quality, at affordable cost.
Pingback by ResourceShelf » Blog Archive » Popularity v. Quality: Assessing Information Quality in a Commercialized Internet - November 1, 2008 @ 2:32 pm
[…] Popularity v. Quality: Assessing Information Quality in a Commercialized Internet In some ways, the Internet is a giant popularity contest. Worth is assessed by Google PageRank – a formula based primarily on how many people link to a site. Every news site prominently displays the most read, most commented, most e-mailed stories. Social news sites such as Digg, reddit, and del.icio.us exist as an aggregation of what is popular around the web. Another level up, PopUrls serves as an aggregator of aggregators, displaying all the most popular headlines from other news-sharing sites. […]
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Comment by office girl - March 10, 2009 @ 10:49 pm
Another example that perhaps takes it far further is the selling of accounts. It’s done on ebay, flickr and forums. When someone has enough ratings or followers or friends or has posted x amount of comments their account is then worth something and are sometimes put up for sale.