Norlin on Trust
Eric Norlin is beginning to think about a taxonomy of trust: 1. You are who you say you are. 2. You do what you say you will do. 3. The combined experience of 1 and 2 builds over time.
As Norlin points out, this applies to one particular type of trust, especially when it comes to transactions and collaboration. But it doesn’t fit so well when applied to squishier relationships. Why did I trust that guy named AKMA — if an AKMA is a guy at all — after reading his first couple of blog entries? In this case I didn’t care much about #1, and #2 doesn’t apply. Different type of trust. Not an objection to Eric’s taxonomy, just a comment on its scope. And implicitly: what’s the relationship of the two types of trust, unless it’st just a trick of language?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
To use one of Miko’s (www.miko.com) favorite expressions, trust is a parametric space.
There are people I would trust to share their last loaf of bread, who I would not trust to get work done at an appropriate quality or level of teamwork.
There are people I trust professionally, but would not trust with a personal problem.
There are folks who have good judgement about people, and bad judgement about money; and vice versa.
Norlin is talking about business trust. This includes some metrics that are easily quantifiable – trusting someone to pay a $50 bill; trusting suppliers to deliver goods on time without defects.
And some metrics that are much harder to quantify, as in likelihood to disclose and maintain common interests in a business deal (these are subject to reputation effects over time.)
– Adina
And then there’s the question of artifact, which is aside from persuasion and aside from trust. I don’t have to trust Patricia Highsmith the person (and I wouldn’t), because her writing is its own trustworthy object. I didn’t take Lester Bangs’s word on records, either.
I don’t have to worry about trusting the Happy Tutor, or AKMA or JOHO the Blogs, because “they” consist of what I read. The extent of my trust is to anticipate something of interest under those labels; the worst outcome of any betrayal is to try again.
If I meet the authors, and they deny any trickle of sincerity in their writings, I’ll be all the more impressed with their achievement (although I may try not to meet them again).
If I meet the authors, and they turn out to be reasonable people, that will be its own pleasure with very little connection to the artifactual pleasure except (maybe) as an easy initiator of conversation.
(Maybe, because a lot of writers don’t really like to talk about what they wrote about.)
The disjunct between authors and what they write has always been there, of course. But the Web enables the authorial persona to become an actual self of some standing. We can *become* what we write in a way that we can’t in the real world because of the difficulty of publishing; it’s too intermittent. On the Web it’s more akin to how we are what we say in the RW, but without the constraints of f2f conversation. Writing and Self are identical on the Web. I think.