The work of a team from the Centre for Social Informatics on the evaluation and management of personal reputations using online information has just been published in Information Research (one of the leading Information Science journals).
Date posted
7 December 2016
The paper reports some of the findings of Frances Ryan's doctoral research. The full study – due to be completed in spring 2017 – takes into account prior research on the building and assessment of reputations through citation practice (as explored in the domain of scientometrics) to consider how people evaluate the personal reputations of others, and create and build their own reputations, through the use of online information.
A key finding of the paper is that social media users are more interested in the *content* of the information that is shared on social media platforms than they are in the *signals that this information might convey about the sharer(s)*. It is also rare for these users to consider the impact of information sharing on personal reputation building and evaluation.
The co-authors of the paper are Peter Cruickshank, Hazel Hall and Alistair Lawson.
For further information, please see the post at https://hazelhall.org/2016/12/07/generation-x-personal-reputation-and-social-media-new-publication-in-information-research/ on Hazel Hall's blog (http://hazelhall.org).