Information, brands and transparency
Last night we hosted a fascinating seminar featuring the team from the EPSRC Fair Tracing Project. The project seeks to bolster the ethical objectives of fair trade by providing consumers and producers with a means of electronically tracing the various steps in the production of fair trade products. One of the potential killer applications on which the team are working is the display of a pie chart that shows the breakdown of revenue for a product in terms of who gets what. Another is the use of Google Maps to trace the distance travelled by produce before it reaches the supermarket shelf.
Dorothea Kline and Maria Jose Montero from the Geography Department at Royal Holloway are team members. Their colleagues are drawn from an interesting mix of disciplinary backgrounds, including information systems, computer science, and interface design.
The discussion was immensely interesting and centred upon a potential paradox: if we give consumers very detailed information about fair trade products, are we not at risk of hollowing out the fair trade brand?
Brands provide shortcuts: for good or ill, they provide many of us with shortcuts to decision-making. We are often, as the social psychologists say, 'cognitive misers': we take the easiest path to a decision based on the minimum of information. Brands are often powerful precisely because they are opaque.
Providing much richer information for fair trade goods renders the whole process less opaque, and therefore less simple and less powerful than a simple fair trade sticker. Do the benefits of transparency outweigh the costs?
Andrew Chadwick
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Reader Comments (2)
Ahhh... you beat me to blogging this. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if this is a profound point with very wide political significance. I would draw a parallel with the impact of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendum Act (2000), which created a transparent financial regime for the funding of political parties. The end result? More financial scandals in the past five years than in the previous thirty, and declining levels of trust in political life. More generally, information overload seems to be as damaging to trust as limiting the details people have access to.
I guess the lesson seems to be that giving people information has the potential to be damaging unless they have the capabilities to assess it and organise it in their own minds. Creating such a situation raises a whole host of additional challenges.
This sounds a really interesting project and as both the post and previous comment indicate, it leads to an interesting paradox.
A someone who thinks aloud, let me rehearse the argument again so that I can understand it better. The aim is to make what is currently hidden from view, namely steps in production and the revenue in each of these steps, transparent and accessible. Now, it would appear that we do not know what is the cost in each step - so there is no way of knowing how the revenue relates to the spend.
However, having easily digestible information on what is a complex issue is most welcome. The team providing it can not predict what would it be used for but from looking at the link to the project I see they are seriously engaging in finding out.
So good luck and keep on exploring.
Dr Lilly Evans