Social Rating as a New Form of Communication in the Digital Space

Digitalization of various aspects of life makes it possible to accumulate large amounts of digitized data about citizens. This allows to rank individuals according to various criteria. Many companies have started to create their own internal ratings, as well as user and customer ratings. In fact, ratings can be perceived as a form of communication between the evaluator and the evaluated, but the rules of interaction are dictated most often only by one of the parties.The paper presents the results of a survey of experts and 3 focus groups of different age categories of the population (youth, middle age and the older generation). The purpose of the article is to identify the features of social rating, its problems and prospects in the context of rapid digitalization of human life. Rating determines not only the position of a person in the coordinate system of assessment, but also the very form of communication.Rating systems can be used to evaluate people’s social behavior, as well as to provide access or create restrictions on the allocation of resources. To date, the nature of the development of social rating systems is determined by business and government agencies, while commercial enterprises have already succeeded with large-scale testing of customer and employee assessment systems. Citizens, on the other hand, become forced participants in rating systems due to the need to obtain the desired services. The positive side of rating is manifested in the simplification of communication between people and the emergence of new mechanisms of social interaction, manifested, among other things, in the expansion of potentially available services. The negative side lies in the potential formation of problems and threats to the introduction of a social rating system, ranging from increased social stratification to restrictions on citizens’ freedoms. One way or another, rating is a powerful tool for influencing communication between actors of social relations.