Proxy Culture
"Proxy culture" refers to the reliance on documented experiences (signifiers) in place of first-hand experiences (the signified). Proxy culture has roots in the intersection of philosophy and technology and 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.[1] This potentially allows individuals to have experiences that would be otherwise difficult to access.
Contents
History
Proxy culture is a relatively new and modern term. It was first used widespread by Luciano Floridi in his paper titled "A Proxy Culture"[1] in 2015 to describe the phenomena where people are increasingly more likely to depend on the infosphere to make decisions.
Luciano Floridi
Luciano Floridi is a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford. He has several recognitions and awards for his work relating to information ethics.[2]
Definition and Etymology
Proxy by itself is primarily defined as "the agency, function, or office of a deputy who acts as a substitute for another."[3] The first known use of the term with in the 15th century and has some roots in Latin.
According to Floridi in his aforementioned paper, the concept and idea of a proxy is different but similar. The concept is rooted religiously, while the idea is political.
Today, a proxy itself is mostly related to technology instead. The purely technical term is related to systems where different signals and requests are used, such as a website interacting with the internet.[1] Proxy culture looks at the human component and how they interact with signifiers to better understand the signified.
Degenerate Proxies
Proxies are epistemologically separate from degenerate proxies because the interactions with a proxy is similar to interacting with the signified. Degenerate proxies fulfill some definitions of a full proxy, but are missing some parts. These degenerate proxies can be categorized in three forms: icons, indexes, and symbols. They are not full proxies because they are merely a standby.[1]
Icons
Icons resemble in appearance to what they represent. For example, a photograph of a dog is an icon for a dog. This is not a full proxy because what happens to the photograph of the dog doesn't directly effect the dog.
Indexes
Indexes are correlational, meaning a given index is often associated with what they represent. An example of this is how dark clouds are an index for rain because those often follow.
Symbols
Symbols represent a category they're typically associated with. A drop of water is a symbol for liquids, for example.
Ethics
Monopolies
Facilitation
Powerful entities often have control over proxy culture in removing or promoting content depending on how much they favor it. Thus, there would be a bias towards themselves created. For example, Google recently was sued for removing Gab from Play Store[4] due to owning competing apps such as Youtube and Google Plus.
Mitigation
Monopolies may utilize proxy culture to damage rivals, but studies have shown that this may be difficult due to the collective action nature of proxy culture. Any user may contribute to proxy culture, yet more credible and frequent editors often reduce potential damage caused by negative competition. [5]
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.[5] It may also facilitate more vulnerability and honesty since participants can worry less about repercussions those who would be hurt by negative feedback.
Pitfalls
Competitors may often sabotage others in order to gain an upper hand. For example, mobile developers post falsified negative ratings on rival apps. This not only damages a competitors reputation, but makes themselves look better.
On the other hand, many commit fraud by inflating app sales or posting falsified app ratings for themselves.[6] To try to pin blame on competitors, a group may post several positive reviews on a competitor's product to get them flagged for fraudulent behavior.
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 quality of crowd sourced content or remove questionable posts. More convincing but still questionable content may pass a bot, but still need to bypass a human moderator to become published. These bots are often non-intrusive, and also serve other functions such as language translation[7]. They help reduce the burden on manual labor and improve efficiency for large-scale sites, but can also make mistakes if they aren't trained for a certain case.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Floridi, Luciano. “A Proxy Culture.” SpringerLink, Springer Netherlands, 21 Oct. 2015, link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-015-0209-8.
- ↑ Oxford Internet Institute. “Professor Luciano Floridi — Oxford Internet Institute”, https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/luciano-floridi/.
- ↑ “Proxy.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proxy.
- ↑ [www.bbc.com/news/technology-41306437 “Google Faces Lawsuit over Removing Gab from Play Store.”] BBC News, BBC, 18 Sept. 2017, www.bbc.com/news/technology-41306437.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Priedhorsky, Reid, et al. 2007. "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia." Group’07 November 4-7, Sanibel Island, Florida.
- ↑ Zhu, Hengshu, et al. "Discovery of ranking fraud for mobile apps." IEEE Transactions on knowledge and data engineering 27.1 (2015): 74-87.
- ↑ Nasaw, Daniel. [www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18892510/ “Meet the 'Bots' That Edit Wikipedia.”] BBC News, BBC, 25 July 2012, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18892510.
