Proxy Culture

According Floridi, proxy culture is the reliance on documented experiences (signifiers) in place of first-hand experiences (the signified). Proxy culture may manifest in many ways, including through the use of Yelp business reviews, Amazon product reviews, and Google Maps to understand businesses, services, products, and more.

History

Proxy culture was first coined by Luciano Floridi in his paper called "A Proxy Culture"</ref name=floridiOriginal> in 2015.

The start of proxy culture could be seen as early as humans gained the ability to communicate. People asking others for their opinion on something is using other people as a signifier to understand the signified.

With the technological revolution and explosion of the infosphere, the use of proxy culture is omnipresent in the first-world.

Ethics

Credibility

Advantages

Reviewers are often anonymous. This allows participants to be anonymized and more comfortable--their words stand on their own, rather than being attached to their gender, race, and income-level. It may also facilitate more vulnerability and honesty since participants can worry less about repercussions,

Pitfalls

Competitors may often sabotage others in order to gain an upper hand. For example, Amazon sellers have been reported for leaving falsified negative reviews on products that compete with their own. This not only damages a competitors reputation, but makes themselves look better.

On the other hand, a person may post falsified positive reviews on products whose success benefits them.

Moderation

To combat an influx of malicious attacks at open-source knowledge bases, bots using machine learning and artificial intelligence have been developed to monitor or remove questionable content. More convincing but still questionable proxies may pass a bot, but still need to bypass a human moderator to become published.