Digitalization, Democracy and Trust

The digitalization of social life brought a renovation of the patterns of creation of trust and distrust. We tend to rely upon new forms of trust: i.e., we make choices based on opinions of unknown net users choose restaurants when traveling, accept as valid the knowledge shared by unknown peers when accessing Wikipedia or do not discuss the choices that algorithms make when we are searching for a date. This trust is posited in a context where our knowledge is reduced to the small portions of information that we can access through the frontend of the systems, but the backend remains a black box that we cannot access, if so, we would probably do not understand. In addition to that our everyday activity is opening the door to new processes of creation of distrust under the form of surveillance, data robbery, propaganda,...

The described context puts pressure on sociologists to try to articulate new approaches to the topic of trust, having solid theoretical foundations on the work of the classics (Simmel, Giddens, Luhmann, or Coleman), to face the new challenges of our societies.