Breakout II.a (Bren 1424):
Issues of information quality, reliability, authority, reputation, provenance, and accountability are increasing important in the current era of social computing. In the age of Web 2.0, traditional notions of credibility premised on hierarchically-organized and centralized authority become problematic. Public knowledge-production websites do an end-run around traditional accreditation methods by evolving elastic combinations of programmatic, semi-formalized, and informal distributed-authority mechanisms that call for a new understanding of credibility and authority. (See the work of the Credibility and Digital Media Project at UCSB, co-directed by Transliteracies faculty Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanagin.)