Reputation as a Mechanism for Coping with the Contingency of Social Addressing

Abstract

The transformation towards a functional differentiation of society and the current emergence of social media have increased the importance of reputation, because persons have become comparable and contingently addressable throughout society. We examine both social media and China’s emerging “social credit system” to determine whether and to what extent these developments point to the development of a symbolically generalized communication medium of reputation, respectively, to a social change from functional to individual differentiation.