User:Zuhui//Personal Reader/Beyond Follows: Trust In Computing
Beyond Follows:Trust in Computing by Sarah Friend
Recommended by Manetta, I really like the text. It overlaps with my interest in how technology is designed to shape our trust in information from journalistic media to online communities, and its consequence.
The text analyzes how we build and show trust in the digital space, and how trust models change depending on how we consume information. author suggests that by examining network structures, we can notice common patterns across different technological contexts, which can lead to better model and understanding the choices we face. also stresses the need for more elaborate systems to better reflect trust quality.
Trust is a felt quality of human relations, ephemeral and changing.
To turn trust into data might seem wrong, like pinning the butterfly – but the butterfly is getting pinned all the time.
When you follow someone on Twitter or upvote someone’s post on Reddit, semantically these are both small gestures of trust for the person being followed or for the post. To parrot Guy Debord, social media is not a series of interactions with technology, it is a social relation among people, mediated by technology.
From reciprocal to directed trust
What has changed about us as people using the internet that leads from reciprocal to directed trust?
When we see reciprocal trust in platforms created more recently, it is often because they make no attempt at being publicly browsable. Trust is still treated as reciprocal when we imagine the accounts we’re trusting as contacts; they map loosely onto “people” (i.e.,accounts) and are treated like an online extension of who we know in real life.
Trust is directed when we have shifted from trusting people to trusting information (or wanting to see content) shared by people. The shift from trusting people to trusting information, and from reciprocal to directed trust, may lead to increasing inequality in the distribution of attention.
binary and weighted trust
Another assumption made in both diagrams so far is that trust is binary, meaning trust is either present or it is not.
With this model, there is no gray middle ground of trust, and the platform allows no expressive potential for the quality of trust. We see binary trust on most major social media networks. I either follow you or I do not.
The alternative is weighted trust, which most people are familiar with in the context of a rating system (like uber, amazon, even rotten tomato etc).
PGP(pretty good privacy), Web of Trust
Possibly the oldest formalized example of a weighted trust network is also one of the oldest formalized trust networks, period. It’s called the web of trust and originated with PGP. Created in 1991, PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and is a tool for encrypting messages like emails. It was designed to be able to keep communication secret without a central authority to verify identity and therefore aid trust.
This web of trust allows everyone to see who is trusted, and by whom, so they can better make decisions about which accounts to trust themselves.
trust level: transitiveness of trust
if I trust you, do I also trust the people you trust? Or do I trust them less than I trust you, but still a little? How many levels outward does my trust ripple before it has fully dissipated?