Trust and the Online Environment

This is more in the line of a hypothesis which I have been pondering.

The transmission of information between humans has been a characteristic of the human species since we began to form communities on the plains of Africa. We have developed ever more sophisticated means to transmit information between individuals, groups and generations allowing us to not only develop the tools for survival, but to make life more comfortable. This has in turn provides us, as a species, with the luxury of time to exchange esoteric ideas about subjects as broad as the origins and purpose of life, the development of meaningful existence and the role of relative moral basis for life.

Prior to the industrial revolution, these ideas were frequently spread within reasonably confined areas. The transmission of oral myths and legends were transmitted by the storytellers who shared with their audience a common set of beliefs and a largely shared worldview. From those times, right down to the industrial revolution ideas were generally shared and understood on the basis of common belief systems and worldviews. Interpretation of “scripture” for instance, was undertaken by the select few and the results proffered to a grateful community who frequently accepted said interpretation without question.

As the industrial revolution empowered the movement of people across the world, ideas were encountered that were foreign, that required deep consideration in order to understand how these new ideas impacted belief structures. A branch of specialists arose who acted as the translators between the new ideas. They provided an interpretation, and in many cases, a buffer which maintained a sense of “them and us” with respect to outside communities.

And then along came the World Wide Web. Individuals could scan ideas from anywhere in the world and integrate them into their own thinking / belief systems etc.

In recent joint civil / military exercises based on large scale disaster response scenarios, observers noted that the development of trust between representatives of culturally disparate organisations appears to be a necessary step in the development of a shared basis of action to respond to exercise situations. Behaviour such as sharing family photographs, life experiences and world views provided an opportunity for individuals to build a cultural understanding from which they could establish a sufficiently robust relationship to work through the issues and challenges associated with the scenario.

A similar behaviour may be perceived in the rise of the so called Web 2.0 phenomenon.  As shown in the figure below, a range of capabilities have been developed to share information between individuals and groups. The base layer of the triangle shows examples of the types of technologies developed to share information through the transmission of hard copy media, stories and pictures.