It's a common, and probably reasonable, question to ask: in the vastness of networked culture, where the chances are great that we'll never meet many people that we encounter in our "travels," how are we supposed to determine who is trustworthy? Lately, the popular answer to this question seems to be "reputation", or more specifically, "reputation management":systems designed to help us rate the thoughts of others, such as those found on EBay or SlashDot. Certainly, when one is purchasing a product or looking for the answer to a technical question, reputation management can be useful. Yet when considered outside of these limited contexts, I think such systems can be counterproductive.

I consider the request of certain LiveJournallers to further control the administration of the "friends" feature to be a particularly troubling example of our over-investment in the power of reputation. Historically, any user on LiveJournal can "befriend" another, but from almost the beginning of LJ, the term “friend” has rivaled “camgirl” as one people love to hate, and in both cases, it is common to hear people calling for alternate terminology. In the case of camgirls, some people want to call themselves" artists," others "entrepreneurs," and even others (academics, mostly) prefer the nearly impossible to define term, “cyborgs.”

In the case of LiveJournal “friends list” one hears frequent requests to abolish the term altogether and replace it with lists of “those I read,” “those who read me,” “those I know in real life,” “those I consider real friends” and so forth. This call grew even stronger once LiveJournal did away with invite codes. All of the sudden, it seemed, new and trollish users appeared with the sole intention of befriending hundreds of LiveJournallers, who didn't appreciate being linked--if only through their "information page"--to names like "Underage XXX" and "KKK Lovers." As a remedy, many on LiveJournal are advocating that the ability to "befriend" strangers be removed, and it seems probably that soon, the term "friend" itself will be removed from the software options. That discussion can be read here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/news/75899.html

Interestingly, although there have been criticisms of specific implementations of reputation management systems (i.e., the existence of plain dumb reviewers on Amazon) I have yet to see a full-on argument regarding what I see as the biggest problem with reputation itself: its reliance on a spherical mode of relationality, as in the phrase, "sphere of influence." Spheres are ways of delimiting space, and with it, people and ideas. Just as the our understanding of the public sphere turns on how we define public (and lock out those who don't fit in), to claim a sphere of influence, one must first declare in advance of the interaction "these are the people/ideas currently influencing me, and these are the ones who do not."

For many--particularly those who have advocated the Net as a new sort of public sphere--this may pose no problem, and might even be desireable. But for those of us who have been attracted to the power of networks as a way to complicate or "mess up" what we see as the limited potential of spherical models for politics (which can be found in everything from identity politics to theories of sacrifice within culture), the advocation of reputation systems is troubling.

I'm in absolute sympathy with those who say that they come to a space like LiveJournal to relax, and not to battle, or even to negotiate boundaries with others. I feel that way myself. But I think this raises an important question: when is the right time, and the right place, to deal with difference in our networked environments? In the branded, mass-mediated world in which we live, what is so terrible about stumbling on to the opinion of someone who has not been vetted in advance for our consumption? Is there no other way to deal with those who pose challenges to us than to build in ways to ignore others, or bomb them off the face of the earth?

What would it mean for us to sit with the challenges of networked environments, rather than rush to demand that they be fixed by systems like reputation management, or further tinkering with the "friends list" concept at LiveJournal? What would it mean for us to understand that these are the challenges facing global culture at large? If Osama bin Laden (the real one) applied to be admitted to your Friendster list, wouldn't it be more productive to ask not, "How do I forbid him from this" but rather, 'How the hell did he get to my name in the first place?"

I have come to see debates about what camgirls and LiveJournal Friends "are" as an excellent primer on the mechanics of what Gayatri Spivak calls strategic essentialism. In her work on subaltern politics, Spivak coined the term to engage the fact that names like woman, black, or "third world" are first and foremost a result of what others think of us, rather than what we think of ourselves. Rather than resisting this dynamic (a gesture she sees as politically futile) Spivak advocates people learn to identify strategically by using labels as what she calls "catachresis." According to Spivak, a politically useful catachresis is one that generates both feelings of affinity and contestation. For example, the term "women of color" works as an umbrella term to describe possible political alliances among radically different people, yet deliberately provokes the question, "What do we even mean when we say this?"

I think the LiveJournal “friend” could serve the same function, and rather than getting “cleaned up,” I this paradigm ought to be expanded into our analysis of geopolitics. For example, beyond its rhetorical capabiliteis, what exactly does it mean to intimate that a dictator overseas has been "befriended" by the CIA in the past? What does friendship in this context entail? What is our responsibility in this situation, once we've asked, and been made aware of complications surrounding the use of the term “friend,” here?

This is a bit of a rant, and I actually don't mean to be so either/or in my presentation, here. I'm certainly no libertarian, and as someone who has been harrassed and attacked myself on LiveJournal and off it, I really understand why people are seeking protection. It's just that there are times when I feel like we could be on the verge of something really difficult, but really profound, in networked spaces like this, and in our rush to seek comfort (which I understand completely), we sometimes lose sight of what is remarkable about the situation in which we are currently finding ourselves.