https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-reputation-society-a-forthcoming-book-by-hassan-masum-and-yi-cheng-zhang/2006/07/30 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Mon, 08 Sep 2014 08:35:32 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-reputation-society-a-forthcoming-book-by-hassan-masum-and-yi-cheng-zhang/2006/07/30/comment-page-1#comment-1533 Sun, 30 Jul 2006 19:41:58 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=357#comment-1533 Good post! The issue of trust is interesting. There’s a distinction I think between trust in people and what I’d prefer to call “confidence” we invest in technical systems. We trust people based on our sense of their intentions and motives. We can trust that a serial killer will hit again. Trusting in a person’s agency, then, has a deep psychological basis (we sometimes trust our sense of a person even more than we trust their words, that’s how deeply our trust is rooted). Confidence in systems, on the other hand, is an investment we make in the scientific rationality behind technololgy, the technology itself, the corporate environment which gives us these products, and so on. These all being relatively easy to rate and capture as reputation etc.
I’m not sure that the trust we have in a person extends to a second degree relation. Insofar as trust involves knowing a person (and I think it does), then the trust we offer to a friend of a friend is a gesture, an extension, and a leap. Social relations exist in part to create and bolster relations where not everybody can know everybody, and where manipulations, lies, and other misrepresentations need to be discouraged by making such behavior too costly.
We can have a very naive view of our social software sometimes; I think what’ll be interesting will be developing reputation, credibility, personality and so on in commercial domains (see Identity 2.0), striking a balance among permission, interests, affinities and social networks, and depth of identity revealed. All these could be tracked, rated, and stored in many different ways, enough to become quite confusing!

]]> https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-reputation-society-a-forthcoming-book-by-hassan-masum-and-yi-cheng-zhang/2006/07/30/comment-page-1#comment-1532 Sun, 30 Jul 2006 19:30:17 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=357#comment-1532 The issue of trust is a very interesting one. I think there ought to be a distinction between the trust we have in people and the confidence we have of technical systems. Both fundamentally have to do with predictability, but trust in people includes agency, or intentional acts; confidence in systems does not (it works by an investment in science, its rationality, and its products).
There’s the matter, too, of whether trust extends beyond first degree relations. If I trust you, do I trust your friends by extension? Clearly it would be a more limited kind of trust. I’m not sure trust is the right word for friends of friends, but adding terms like reputation, affinity, etc. helps. To the extent that software can capture and represent “trust,” it can represent patterns, consistency and interests, the footprints of activity but not intentions themselves.
Thanks for the post!

]]>