
49The Forces Driving Online Reputation
the Onion, a satirical newspaper; both websites are measured by the
same criteria, with no favoritism toward one or the other. Nor does
the Google algorithm know the difference between some individual’s
website and the Washington Post; to the algorithm, they’re both just
websites to be measured along the same scale, even if that means the
Post will usually win.
Internet scholar Andrew Keen thinks this new egalitarianism
will trash our culture, to the point of mindless Youtube clips replac-
ing meaningful movies and plays. In his book, The Cult of the Ama-
teur, he predicts that the noise created by amateurish user ...