Abstract
This exploratory chapter is about the impact of digital technologies on trust. Its aim is to make the case for a non-standard approach to cooperation in a digitally enhanced society. It argues that prominent implications of digital technologies for trust are better understood if we take digital technologies qua means of recording (rather than means of communication). Changes in the memory properties of our environments of interaction are put forward as key to understanding the evolution of trust in a connected society. A research framework is proposed to spell out the impact of digitally extended memories on trust and applied to the case of interpersonal trust powered by social media.
I am especially indebted to Richard Holton, as usual. I thank Milad Doueihi, Maurizio Ferraris, Laurent Jaffro, Alex Oliver and Enrico Terrone for invaluable discussions. I also thank Pauline Boyer, Bassel Gothaymi, Jens van Klooster, Lamara Leprêtre, Cathy Mason, Victor Parchment and Daphnée Setondji for precious feedback on previous versions.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, in Tim Berners-Lee’s own words: “The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. What we believe, endorse, agree with and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented in the Web. We all have to ensure that the society we build with the Web is of the sort we intend” (Berners-Lee 2000, 133).
- 2.
See AirBnB, (https://www.airbnb.com/trust, https://www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy/) and BlaBlaCar (https://www.blablacar.fr/blablalife/inside-story/in-trust-we-trust) to mention but two among the most popular digitally powered cooperative infrastructures that have emerged in the last few years.
- 3.
Anthropologist Daniel Miller has argued (with evidence from his fieldwork) that it is meaningless to formulate general theses about what digital connectivity does to our relations. For any plausible thesis, we can find an opposed and equally defendable position as soon as we look at another socio-cultural context. Extrapolating slightly, the idea is that digitization has no cross-contextual stable meaning. I contend a memory approach could fit, or accommodate, Miller’s razor. This is in part due to the modesty of the proposal, as it does not aim at formulating a single strong thesis about what the digital does to trust. This is also due, I believe, to the fact that it tackles a structural feature of digital technologies (their being recording devices) which lies behind myriads of their possible uses.
- 4.
This sort of “evidence” can take a dramatic turn, as in the case of this man whose WhatsApp messages were apparently used by his interlocutor to accuse him of blasphemy https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/16/pakistan-man-sentenced-to-death-for-ridiculing-prophet-muhammad-on-whatsapp
- 5.
See the debate around the current reform of the Department of Homeland Security system of records that intends to “expand the categories of records to include the following: [. . .] the USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Service] Online Account Number; social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results.” (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/09/18/2017-19365/privacy-act-of-1974-system-of-records effective from the 18/10/17, document number 82 FR 43556).
- 6.
- 7.
This is probably part of Nietzsche’s quest at the outset of his Genealogy of Morals. I return to that later.
- 8.
See cybersecurity specialist Bruce Schneier on that: “Before computers, what we said disappeared once we’d said it. Neither face-to-face conversations nor telephone conversations were routinely recorded. A permanent communication was something different and special; we called it correspondence. The Internet changed this. [. . .] These conversations [. . .] all leave electronic trails. And while we know this intellectually, we haven’t truly internalized it. We still think of conversation as ephemeral, forgetting that we’re being recorded and what we say has the permanence of correspondence” (“How to keep your private conversation private for real”, Washington Post, March 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/08/conversations-online-are-forever-now-heres-how-to-keep-yours-private/?utm_term=.324abf524c21). See also “The death of ephemeral conversation” (Forbes, October 18, 2016, https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/the_death_of_ep.html) and “The future of ephemeral conversation” (Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2008, https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/11/the_future_of_e.html).
- 9.
For accessibility, this corresponds to two of the main features of archives: “Accessibility” (synchronically) and “Conservation” (diachronically) as defined by Assmann (2012, 329).
- 10.
See the “cofveve tweet” case. The tweet was taken down very quickly by the account that posted it, but this was too late, since many viewers had already screenshot and shared it.
- 11.
Epistolary conversations have always been a laboratory of relationships, where intimacy is built and norms of confidence and privacy are negotiated. For example, Lagerspetz (2014) notes that eighteenth century epistolary culture regarded some letters as belonging to a quasi-public domain, as in Goethe’s letters (see his autobiography and his correspondence with Schiller, as well as the narrative usage of letters in The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister) which were meant to be read to a group of friends and discussed in a circle: “. . . Goethe tells us that in his youth it was normally expected that private letters might be read aloud in company without anyone thinking it was a breach of trust. In a sense, letters were the blogs of the time. The first volume of his autobiography was published 1811, forty years after the events he describes. At the time, he clearly felt that attitudes had changed so much that he needed to clarify earlier practices to his readers” (Lagerspetz 2014, 141). On the role of letters in the evolution of the sense (and norms) of intimacy, see Eden (2012). Eden studies the rediscovery of Cicero’s sermo familiaris by Petrarch and then Erasmus and Montaigne in the perspective of the emergence of the grammar of intimate relationships shaping modern individuality.
- 12.
I can’t help noticing that, in their very name, accounts bring their forensic flavor, that we also find in the rest of related terms: “to sign in,” “to sign up,” “to log in,” “to identify,” “to authenticate” . . ..
- 13.
I thank Milad Doueihi for this phrase.
- 14.
Even the God of the Old Testament is sometimes asked to forget (and not only to forgive) his creatures’ sins, as in Job 13: 26: “For thou write bitter things against me and make me to inherit the iniquities of my youth”; and Psalm of David 25: “I trust in you [. . .]. Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake.”
- 15.
Human connectedness and technical connectivity “[. . .] making the Web social” in reality means “making sociality technical.” Sociality coded by technology “renders people’s activities formal, manageable, and manipulable, enabling platforms to engineer the sociality in people’s everyday routines” (van Dijck 2013). While Van Djick, in a provider-centered approach, appropriately focuses on the way the platforms themselves take part in the management of our relationships and networks, here I am highlighting the fact that forms of management or of bureaucracy are found also on the users’ side.
- 16.
US patent awarded on June 30, 2015, US9070088B, “Determining Trustworthiness and Compatibility of a Person.”
- 17.
Indeed, this area was in a sense pioneered by Benedict Anderson, with his reflection on the role of printing technologies in the widening of political communities and the emergence of nation states (Anderson 1991). If there is historical correlation between print records and national sentiment, which forms of common life are powered by digital records?
- 18.
As noted by (Taeyoon 2017): “However, contemporary society lacks such zones for free association as public spaces are turned into privately owned ones (i.e. community spaces being carefully converted into shopping malls) and mechanisms of surveillance proliferate.”
- 19.
Part of these issues is the new research field fake news (flourishing in academia since the 2016 US elections), which could also be approached in terms of what widespread recorded conversations do to social epistemology and the public debate. I have tried to develop this perspective in a paper presented at the conference “Web et Post-vérité,” March the 9th 2017, Collège d’Etudes Mondiales (Paris), at the international conference “Post-truth, New Realism, and Democracy” at the University of Turin (EHESS, CAS Uniri, Kate Hamburger Kolleg “Recht als Kultur”, FMSH), October the 24th 2017, and at the workshop “La révolution documédiale”, Fondation Maison Sciences de l’Homme (Paris), February the 20th 2018.
- 20.
For a review of the literature from this perspective, see, for example, Bargh and McKenna (2004).
- 21.
- 22.
That the encounters we can make through digital interfaces do not have the same flavor as face-to-face encounters may be an empirical limit that future forms of telepresence will overcome. In contrast, the high level of control over our self-presentation allowed by digital technologies seems to be a conceptual limit (Cocking 2008, 123–41).
- 23.
“The fact that this problem [for nature to breed an animal able to make promises] has to a great extent been solved must seem all the more astonishing to a person who knows how to appreciate fully the power which works against this promise-making, namely forgetfulness. [. . .] Now, this particular animal, which is necessarily forgetful, in which forgetfulness is present as a force, as a form of strong health, has had an opposing capability bred into it, a memory, with the help of which, in certain cases, forgetfulness will cease to function—that is, for those cases where promises are to be made. … Precisely that development is the long history of the origin of responsibility” (Nietzsche 2006).
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Domenicucci, J. (2018). Trust, Extended Memories and Social Media. In: Romele, A., Terrone, E. (eds) Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75759-9_7
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