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. This potentially allows individuals to have experiences that would be otherwise difficult to access.

Wikipedia is a classic example of proxy culture in practice.

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" 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.

Luciano Floridi's headshot from his website.

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." 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. 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.

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

Powerful entities who are in charge of information dissemination thus have control over proxy culture by curating content. Thus, these entities could unfairly demote or promote products that would benefit themselves. For example, Microsoft was accused and prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department of creating a monopoly for internet browsers by not allowing its operating system users to download the competing internet browsers Netscape and Opera. Due to being rules as breaking antitrust law, this resulted in Microsoft being broken up into separate software and hardware units.

Monopolies in proxy culture are ethically concerning because they do not promote healthy competition, innovation, and fairness. In the extreme case where there is only one entity in control of an entire market because all other competitors are blocked out, there would be no challenges from competition for them--effectively allowing that entity to raise their prices and lower the quality of their products without any threats. The producer has no incentive to innovate and this forces consumers who rely on these monopolistic market to likely use or pay more for subpar products. Without a monopoly, the consumer would have more choice to pick the best product and entities continually compete to create quality products.

Mitigation

Despite how monopolies may utilize proxy culture to damage rivals, 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.

Credibility

There are also several concerns over bias in proxy culture. People who have particularly negative or positive experiences are more likely to contribute over neutral ones. Furthermore, there can be more issues with more groups being inclined to participate. For example, only about 10-15% of Wikipedia contributions come from women.

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 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. 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

Reddit often employs bots to moderate their forums, and users can develop their own for other purposes.

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. 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.