Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media by Alberto Romele & Enrico Terrone

Author:Alberto Romele & Enrico Terrone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

6 Conclusion: Pay-Off and Limits of this Approach

I proposed a matrix to frame the investigation of trust in a digitally enhanced society, and I sketched its application to the case of interpersonal trust powered by social media. The ambition of this framework is to be applicable to different forms of trust , from fides publica to fides monetaria and fides mercatoria.

The evolution of the memory environment of our interactions raises questions about its effects on public and political trust . How does trust in public institutions, in political parties and in political leaders evolve when reputation is recorded and capitalized online? How do notions like citizenship and community evolve when (imagined17) identities are stored by digital platforms, that is, by private18 owned social memories?19 On the fides mercatoria side, we are faced with a variety of issues. The development of smart insurance systems, the digitization of firm-customer relationships and the problem of users’ control over their personal data , are among the main stakes. Concerning fides monetaria, trust in currencies, the study of Blockchain technology, with its distributed ledgers, invites us to reflect on the nature of money (Mallard, Méadel, and Musiani 2014) and on the future of capitalism, if we take seriously the role of records for this form of civilization, as famously highlighted by de Soto (2003).

Besides their local effects on different situations where trust is a stake, widespread digitally recording devices create new bridges and new barriers across traditional modes of interaction. These recording devices carry their own maps of relations: unexpected bridges between friendship and commerce, affection and career, celebrity and information , for-profit and charity, leisure and work. Traditionally distinct registers of trust can become hardly discernible when friendship ends up intertwined with commerce, governed by forms of commercial trust ruled, for example, by a caveat emptor principle. The way these evolving maps of sociality affect our very perception of relationships is yet to be studied. Evolutions in the boundaries between personal and impersonal, institutional or peer-to-peer interactions, as well as the privatization of the spaces of encounter, seem crucial stakes here.

Digital trust . Under the heading “digital trust ,” I tried to advocate a broadening of this research field. As a matter of fact, digital technologies have been mainly investigated as media; that is, as means of communication and channels of information .20 In contrast, this chapter fits a current turn to question this communicational model.21 Treating digital technologies qua recording devices is all the more relevant for Social Media since research has been mainly concerned with the types of evidence unavailable in online encounters (Pettit 2004; Simpson 2011), the limits to legal devices securing online trust (Hurwitz 2013, 1605–13) and the challenges of telepresence (Daft and Lengel 1986; Lo and Cocking 2008; Lie 2008; Harper 2009; Dreyfus 2015; Simpson 2016).22

Memory and trust . Under the heading “memory and trust ,” I made just a first attempt to bring memory issues to the attention of trust students. After all, this could be a way to renew the take on a question Nietzsche was elaborating in his Genealogy of Morality.

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