Who Cares?

With the rise of reputation as online concurrency, & becoming more than cach’e, the question is asked how exactly the exchange rate works, & whether futures trading has any relevance for the Whuffie.

If you are now lost, then you’re not a part of the future economy. You may not even care about it, even if you could become aware of it. That’s OK, we’re all slowly catching up with what’s been happening in that other world - the online world - where some things that don’t seem to be more than figments of the imaginations of nerdy people are getting their own reality.

Many people are building an online reputation as if it ‘means something’, to which you could rightly respond “who cares?” - or else, you’re wondering if you’re being left behind. If the former, then you have nothing to fear - go back to TV. If the latter, then you may have been sucked in like a newbie getting a poorly-written hard luck story from Nigeria offering a small fortune in exchange for some simple bank account details.
People who do something well, know more than others, have lots of friends, or simply are arrogant enough to believe their own amateur publicity, are building a name for themselves, building themselves up, selling their soul, however you like to describe it, in that big red light district that is the internet. Yes, I use that metaphor advisedly because as often as not people put themselves out there on display with no idea of their actual worth, often out of low self-esteem, hoping to get enough currency to live off for a short while & forget about their mundane existence until they go back out on the web & do it all again - & it’s all legal. The internet is Amsterdam.

The new currency is the Whuffie - online reputation, social capital, the size of your facebook friends list, your linked-in network, your twitter followers, your reach, your pull. It’s like a measure of celebrity, but a little more useful to you & a little more direct & personal.

Celebrity is still a currency in the real world, & it can translate into hard cash currency sometimes (box office or television audiences turn into direct sales or advertising income or endorsement contracts, turning into a pay packet). Whuffie can work like this, sometimes - reach becomes traffic becomes eyeballs on monetisable real estate becomes click-through on ad placements turning into cash-flow for the online publisher, which is hopefully you.

But Whuffie is more about the possibility of gaining benefit, rather than the benefit received, which is a whole futures market, not an exchange rate. People are measured by their earning potential, not the actual income.
This whole scenario is only relevant to the information rich. It is only those who have access to the net & spend time being social who are even vaguely aware of the possibility of someone having an online reputation (as opposed offline, that is, through print & broadcast media). The likelihood of someone whose computer skills don’t go beyond sending an email in upper case caring two hoots about someone’s online reputation is equivalent to the success rate of the afore-mentioned Nigerian scammer.

People who don’t watch TV or go to the cinema have no idea about current celebrities. People who don’t use google to find things don’t need to know about Whuffie. People get by without TV, but it’s getting harder to ‘live’ in the offline world without online access. That constant source of often factual information is such a necessity for ‘real life’ that it is becoming harder to escape that need to be connected to the information superhighway. This means it’s going to get even harder to avoid being known when you’re on it, or to avoid getting an awareness of how unknown you are in the big connected world that the web is. This means you are only one short step away from cadging your first inkling of social currency, like some country hick arriving in the big city without a coin in your pocket.

The information poor will get by somehow. They will integrate into a broader society that has a place for all. They will be marked by how they speak, what they wear, & where they live, as they always have been in the offline world. They will try to fit in, try to improve themselves, try to get on, build a future, leave a legacy for their children. They will need to earn their way, & do it in Whuffie.

One day, there will be charities on the internet who will dispense reputation like food parcels. They will sit down & read people’s blogs & leave nice comments. They will provide shelter for those so poor that they don’t have a home page to go to.

That’s when you know that someone really cares.