The trust in user generated content is an interesting by product of the Web 2.0 world.
I routinely use Wikipedia as one of my first sources of information when researching topics. The fact that all of the information in Wikipedia is continually provided and updated by the web community enhances is utility. For example, when I made my first Wikipedia entry, I felt empowered that I was providing value-added content to a resource that is available world-wide. But, how much trust can a person put in the information that Wikipedia, or any other website that provides user generated contact?
When I was in college and first starting using newsgroups to get information about specific topics, my professors surprisingly questioned the validity of the Internet resources. It is interesting to reflect back and see how little trust my professors were placing on information obtained from newsgroups since it was a rather new and unfamiliar type of resource. By comparison, the validity of my any of my archaic text references was never questioned.
Fast-forward to day, and in our Web 2.0 there is almost an unlimited number of user generated websites that are bursting with information, and I have been encouraged to uses these types of sites for research and reference information. Clearly the trust in these sites has grown over time. I suspect the trust has grown because more people (and professors) are using these resources and understand their utility.
On a personal note, my mother no longer trusts her own child's spoken positive recommendations about an experience restaurant, and instead routinely turns to TripAdvisor for recommendations. Upon hearing about her tacticts, I laughed and thought that it was silly that she was trusting stranger's recommendations over her own family's input. But, just today, I, too, found myself doing the exact same thing – I turned to TripAdvisor to get information about a hotel, to verify a college's recommendations. Based on a single random unknown person's positive review about the hotel, I elected to stay there, instead of basing my selection solely on my friend's recommendations.
Are we turning into a society where we no longer trust the people we know but instead place our trust in complete strangers? Though, perhaps we are instead just learning how to extending our circle of trust.
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Trust no one -- :)
ReplyDeleteThis is so interesting.
I think some of it has to do with a desire for full information.. I want to know what "10 things to do in Boston" might be for 10 different people so that I can choose the 5 that sound most interesting.
Another thing is statistics - mom may have liked that restaurant because of the dish she chose or the chef's mood that night. Gettig several other people's opinions adds to the liklihood that they are correct.
Then again - there is the Resume` reasoning - we are actually looking for a reason to NOT like it, therefore narrowing our options by process of elimination.