What I mean by "hyper-networked" is basically what it sounds like: while there is simple networking in the offline world, the online world (and larger new media environment) is marked by the proliferation, collision, and combination of networks, both social and technological. The increasingly complex network world online presents us with credibility issues at a large scale.

In a traditional offline environment, social networks map closely to geographical ones, and you can assess someone's credibility by using their credentials as a sort of shortcut. For example, if your doctor has a degree from Harvard Medical School, you would tend to find them credible. If they had a degree from a medical school in India, you wouldn't know how to assess it. (Assuming you are situated in a Euro-American social network; if you are in India, this might be reversed!)

Online, these network collisions happen even more often--it is unlikely that you would run into a doctor with foreign credentials in the US, but online, you might find a Harvard-educated doctor posting on a forum next to an Indian doctor, and then maybe someone trained in Traditional Chinese Medicine, a homeopath, or a chiropractor!

Each of these people come from different social networks in the offline world, but online, they can all participate in the same network of the forum. The person searching for medical advice online can find this network and a variety of others in close proximity, and when they do, they are presented with a problem: how do I assess the credibility of these people?

One possible solution we're working with is to take advantage of the same hyper-networkedness that caused the problem in the first place. Someone looking to assess the credibility of someone or some information can explore the network in which the information is found to contextualize it. Nothing online exists in a vacuum, so if you found some piece of advice on a message board, you could look at previous posts by the poster, see their history on the board, or find reactions to their posts from other board members. If these things can't be found, you could move up a level in the network and try searching for similar terms in other message boards.

Contextualization is a powerful way to examine credibility. Information can exist in many overlapping contexts (or networks) online, and the user can explore these networks looking for markers of credibility to create a more thoroughly situated picture of a particular piece of information. The perils of credibility online (anonymity and lack of accountability, among others) may be balanced out by the increased ability to contextualize any assertion in ways previously unimaginable.

Stay tuned while we figure out just what these "markers of online credibility" could be!