Le pouvoir des systèmes de réputation et Howard Rheingold

Via Smartmobs.com. Très intéressantes, les notes de l'intervention de Howard Rheingold à la conférence annuelle SXSW de Austin, Texas, transcrites sur le vif par Heath Row dans son billet Mobile Communication, Pervasive Computing, and Collective Action ; extrait :

"The question I ask is, What could we do walking around that we can't do now, given a simple reputation system? There's any number of things. If you want to connect with someone who's looking at the same problem, you can do so with a few keystrokes. We all do that. When we're walking down the street, we're surrounded by people we don't know. Some of those people may have common cause with us, but we don't know who they are, and we can't trust them so far.
There's some experiments going on with ride sharing. There's a big payoff there. If you're a big company like Boeing with 70,000 employees going to the same place in Seattle, you're paying the city a lot of money to pay for the wear and tear on the roads.

But the thing with reputational systems is that only geeks change defaults. The ability to coordinate and find common cause with people goes beyond selling a bike or finding a date. The keynote yesterday by the folks at MoveOn is a great example. You don't need to write for the Times to write stories. The Dean campaign failed, but it raised unprecedented amounts of money online. In Kenya and Ghana, were there was a lot of concern about ballot boxes, people with cell phones would coordinate with radio stations to report how many people actually went to vote.

Is this going to be better for democracy? I wouldn't leap to ensure that. It is more democratic. The manipulation of the crowd is a great tool for fascists. Disinformation can spread to more people in less time. The more people who understand what these dynamics are, the better chance we'll have control over what will emerge. We're seeing that the Internet is not as uncensorable as we thought. It used to be that the end-to-end nature meant that the Internet just sent bits around. You couldn't really filter. But now big cable companies petition the FCC to lift that prohibition.

The Internet is going to be balkanized. You have to be a technology geek and policy wonk to understand what's going on. The new regime is not set in stone. WiFi is a really good example. In essence, that really began with ham radio operators. These little patchworks are beginning to become quilts. I don't think the entire world will become covered with WiFi, but the Web is not at 2400 baud (...)."