Who do you trust?Media in the era of

participation

MAC309robert.jewitt@sunderland.ac.uk

1

2

“Don’t trust anyone over the age of 30” Jack Weinberg

Trust and reputation

3

2 frequently mentioned terms in Public Relations discourse

The value of corporate bodies is often tied up in the credibility of their reputations ie. their trustworthiness

See Michael G Cherenson ’s (Public Relations Society of America) slides:

Trust and reputation

4

2 frequently mentioned terms in Public Relations discourse

The value of corporate bodies is often tied up in the credibility of their reputations

See Michael G Cherenson ’s (Public Relations Society of America) slides

Trust and reputation

5

The value of corporate bodies is often tied up in the credibility of their reputations ie. their trustworthiness eg. BP’s Deeepwater oil spill

Defining ‘trust’

6

Defining ‘trust’

7

‘confidence in or reliance on a quality or attribute of a person or thing, or the truth of a statement’ Oxford Dictionary

Historical thinkers

8

Max Weber Erving Goffman

Contemporary thinkers

9

Anthony Giddens Ulrich Beck

Modernity

10

‘the nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems, especially trust in expert systems’ (Giddens, 1990: 83)

Modernity and modern societies

11

Modernity disembeds social relationships from local contexts.

We come into contact with "strangers" on a more regular basis than inhabitants of premodern societies were.

The premodern means of determining whether a person is "trustworthy" are generally less helpful to modern people.

Modernity and modern societies

12

In premodern societies, you could manage personal risks by placing trust in people whom you knew personally, through kinship networks (real or fictive) or the ties of local communities.

13

Click to play

Modernity and modern societies

14

In modern society we are regularly forced to entrust our personal and financial security to people with whom we have fleeting, if any, face-to-face contact.

Abstract systems?

15

Systems of specialist knowledge that regularly call on us to put our faith in the skills of faceless, absent others?

Abstract systems?

16

Systems of specialist knowledge that regularly call on us to put our faith in the skills of faceless, absent others Money and the banking system (trust in the value of

the pound?) Road signs and traffic systems (trust in the rules of

the road, other drivers, the DVLA, etc for vehicular safety)

Building safety (trust in laws of physics, architect, builders, etc)

Internet banking/shopping (trust in software security of computer, stability of network, retailer, etc)

“It is no wonder that people have come to distrust computer-based record-keeping operations. Even in non-governmental settings, an individual’s control over the personal information that he gives to an organization, or that an organization obtains about him, is lessening as the relationship between the giver and receiver of personal data grows more attenuated, impersonal, and diffused. There was a time when information about an individual tended to be elicited in face-to-face contacts involving personal trust and a certain symmetry, or balance, between giver and receiver. Nowadays an individual must increasingly give information about himself to large and relatively faceless institutions, for handling and use by strangers—unknown, unseen and, all too frequently, unresponsive. Sometimes the individual does not even know that an organization maintains a record about him. Often he may not see it, much less contest its accuracy, control its dissemination, or challenge its use by others.” (Advisory Committee to the Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare, Records,

Computers and the Rights of Citizens, at § II, 1973, available at http://aspe.hhs.gov/datacncl/1973privacy/tocprefacemembers.htm)

17

Institutions

18

Replaced our previous (local) ‘trust’ relationships

‘Trust’ in modern societies

19

Pre-modernGeneral context: overriding importance of localised trust

ModernGeneral context: trust relations vested in disembedded abstract systems

1. Kinship relations as an organising device for stabilising social ties

1. Personal relationships of friendship or sexual intimacy as means of stabilising social ties

2. The local community as a place, providing familiar environment

2. Abstract systems as a means of stabilising relations across indefinite spans of time-space

3. Religious cosmologies as modes of belief and ritual interpreting nature and life

3. Future-orientated, counter-factual thought as a mode of connecting past and present

4. Tradition as a means of connecting present and future; past-orientated

Table adapted from Giddens, 1990, The Consequences of Modernity, p102.

‘Risk’ in modern societies

20

Pre-modernGeneral context: overriding importance of localised trust

ModernGeneral context: trust relations vested in disembedded abstract systems

1. Threats and dangers emanating from nature, such as the prevalence of infectious diseases, climatic unreliability, floods, etc

1. Threats and dangers emanating from the reflexivity of modernity

2. The threat of human violence from marauding armies, local warlords, brigands, or robbers

2. The threat of human violence from the industrialisation of war

3. Risk of a fall from religious grace or of malicious magical influence

3. The threat of personal meaninglessness deriving from the reflexivity of modernity as applied to the self

Table adapted from Giddens, 1990, The Consequences of Modernity, p102.

Trust in the media?

21

2006: International poll by BBC; Reuters; US think tank The Media Centre

10,230 people from 10 counties http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/496555

0.stm

22

23

24

25

26

The Quality and Independence of British Journalism?

27

2008: Cardiff School of Journalism

Analysed the quantity of public relations material and news agency copy within news output

http://www.mediastandardstrust.org/resources/mediaresearch.aspx

The Quality and Independence of British Journalism?

28

Journalists are producing more copy (3 x more than 20 years ago)

Majority is based on news agency copy or public relations material (60% of press and 34% of broadcast stories)

The most PR influenced topic was health, followed by consumer/business news and entertainment/sport'

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn8trMXe8ok

Online is different? “Why is credibility essential

online and , more to the point, different than in the analog physical world?”

29

Online is different? “Why is credibility essential

online and, more to the point, different than in the analog physical world?”1. Information is disconnected

from any physical origin2. Interactions are mediated by

software

30

Media literacy & credibility assessment While children are exposed

to online media at an increasingly early age, studies show that many adolescents do not possess the expertise required to search the Web efficiently or critically assess the credibility of what they find Hargittai et al, 2010

31

Media literacy & credibility assessment “people know they ‘should’

critically analyze the information they obtain online, yet rarely have the time or energy to do it” Metzger, 2007, p. 2078

32

Media literacy & credibility assessment

33

34

Wikipedia (case study)

35

Nupedia

36

2000: Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger founded Nupedia High quality online encyclopaedia Managed, written & reviewed by experts Voluntary basis 7 stage review process 1 year in: $120000 spent; only 24 articles

Nupedia

37

Added ‘wiki’ software to Nupedia site Invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995 Much faster to post and edit articles Anyone could edit Nupedia advisory board rejected it Wikipedia didn’t generate revenue Sanger was laid off in 2001 Wikipedia transferred to nonprofit status

Wikipedia in figures

38

• 2001: 15,000 articles• 2009: 2.7 million+ articles• 1 million+ registered users• 100,000 users posted 10+ articles• 75,000 regular editors• 5,000 hardcore maintain site• 5 paid staffers

– See Tapscott & Williams, 2008: 72; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_Wikipedia

Why did it grow?

39

“Why do people play softball? It’s fun, it’s a social activity … We are gathering together to build this resource that will be made available to all the people of the world for free. That’s a goal people can get behind.” Jimmy Wales cited in Tapscott & Williams, 2008:

72

40

Criticisms

41

Reliability?

Jimmy Wales

42

Jimmy Wales

43

Crowd wisdom?

44

Surowiecki claims that the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ comes about when large groups of people who do not have tight connections to each other can pool their knowledge without having to come to an agreement.

This is what makes Wikipedia work…

Mumbai attacks

45

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_attacks See page history

First post

46

1 hour later…

47

9 hours later

48

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2008_Mumbai_attacks&dir=prev&offset=20081127021154&action=history

9 hours, 30 seconds later

49

Spontaneous division of labour

50

See Shirky, 2008: p118 Unmanaged and organic; self-policing

Article is created Attracts readers (who are also potential

contributors) Some add text; some fix layout; some add

references; etc

‘None of these people needs to know everything… Every edit is provisional … Bad changes can be rooted out faster … Human knowledge is provisional’

Tools to reinforce trust

51

These tools provide more transparency to the edit process WikiScanner http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ Wiki Dahsboard http://wikidashboard.parc.com/ Wikirage http://www.wikirage.com/

These tools make more accurate and useful Powerset http://www.powerset.com/ Wikirank http://wikirank.com/en

The darkside of trust?

52

‘The more people trust, the easier they are for others to exploit’ (James Surowiecki, 2004: 116)

53

Click to play

The trouble with Web 2.0…

54

• ‘Sanger came to his sense about Wikipedia. He recognised the appallingly destructive consequences of the Wikipedia experiment… [T]he democratization of information can quickly degenerate into an intellectually corrosive radical egalitarianism. The knowledge of the expert, in fact, does trump the collective “wisdom” of amateurs’• Keen, 2008: 186

Examples of collaboratively produced knowledge

55

Britannica Nupedia Wikipedia Citizendium

Wikileaks

56

Questions

57

Do we ‘trust’ the media? How might we explain our relationship to it? On what basis do we or don’t we trust the media?

Should Wikipedia be trusted? Should we trust it more or less than established media sources?

How can Wikipedia work against its doubters to make itself more ‘trustworthy’?

Sources

58

BBC, 2006, ‘Media holds its own in trust poll’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4965550.stm (the full report can be found here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/02_05_06mediatrust.pdf)

Andrew Keen, 2008, The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy, London: Nicholas Brearly Publishing

Tom Leonard, 2008, ‘Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales in online love spat’, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1580689/Wikipedias-Jimmy-Wales-in-online-love-spat.html

Clay Shirky, 2008: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, London: Allen Lane.

James Surowiecki, 2004, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few, London: Abacus

Don Tapsoctt & Anthony D. Williams, 2008, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, London: Atlantic Books

59

Rcade, 2009, Newseum: Do You Trust Blogs?

EPI2oh, 2010, Deepwater Horizon Fire vagawi , 2009, Trust Nicolasnova, 2007, Modernity SlipStreamJC, 2006, plane in cables Robjewitt, 2011, I promise to pay the

bearer Sonicbloom, 2006, In Google We Trust