Trust and the Reflection on Social Media Related Risks

Several weeks ago newspapers were full of the Prism-scandal and still there are lots of discussions about it. Platforms like facebook presumably gave access to their user data. In a seminar I held last semester about internet-based exchange and cooperations some students discussed this problem where the spectrum of comments reached from “it doesn´t really matter, because my data isn´t relevant to them (NSA)” and “everybody is responsible for what data he or she offers to facebook” to disgusting reactions with the announcement to leave the platform. I don´t know if these students really left facebook, but usually events like this irritate only for a short time the “habitual trust” people have in technology. To put it shortly people´s naive confidence in technology is disturbed by short moments of reflection caused by the thematization of technology related problems respectively risks.

In contrast to the main assumption of the session organizers in our opinion not a loss of confidence but an unreflected attitude at least towards social media technology is common. We would like to discuss these contrary positions in regard to sociological approaches on trust. In sociology the phenomenon “trust” is mainly considered as a form of calculated risk taking corresponding to specific decision situations in social interactions. With this a mainly reflexive form of trust is addressed. Even approaches in which several types of trust are differentiated there is a tendency to regard i.e. “habitual trust” as a form which evolves from “reflexive trust”. Beyond this we would like to figure out the preconditions “reflexive” as well as “habitual trust” in relation to the phenomenon of distrust.