Time for Trust? Scale and relationality in understanding trust relations between people, technologies and institutions

Part 3: Institutions and technologies as mediators of trust

Source: World Economic Forum.

At this point I want to shift the analytical lens from trust in a generic sense to forms of trust (and mistrust) that are mediated. There are two levels of mediation in play. One is the mediating role of institutions. Following the economist Douglass North’s definition of institutions as ‘the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction’ (North, 1994, p. 360), we can understand institutions as the meso-level entities through which individuals form into collective social entities and are thus part of a society.

In asking “How is society possible?”, Georg Simmel observed that an individual in a society is both a person and the bearer of a social role (a merchant, a teacher, an artist, a politician, etc.), and is thus both a human subject and a “social individual.” Moreover, each individual experiences the society in part as something that is external to them — the legal system, for instance, exists independently of the individuals that are subject to it (Möllering, 2001; Simmel, 1910). As a result, there is an intermediate level of trust between the trust that individuals have in one another, and trust in a society or a system, and that is trust in the institutions of a society. As trust is placed in both individual institutions and in an institutional order, there is interdependency in trust relationships between individuals, institutions, and society as a whole. Drawing upon the work of Max Weber, Nau has argued that “institutions represent the structuring principles of collective value systems. Ideas and interests manifest themselves in institutions” (Nau, 2005, p. 131).

Consideration of the role played by institutions in shaping trust draws attention to the limits of conceiving of trust as motivated entirely by either perceived instrumental gain or by morality or social bonds. Two important distinctions need to be made when discussing institutions. One is between the institutional arrangements or governance structures through which resources are allocated within particular organisations (the microscopic level), and the institutional environment (macroscopic level), or the ‘rules of the game in a society’ (North, 1990, p. 3). The other is between formal institutions, which include rules, laws, constitutions, allocations of property rights etc., and informal institutions or constraints, such as norms of behaviour, conventions, and self-imposed codes of conduct. The latter have histories that go over decades, centuries and even millennia, and are harder to transform than formal institutions. The latter also connect institutions to culture, and to ideologies and belief systems.

The second sense in which we are referring to mediation is, not surprisingly, through media. Trust in the media is a widely surveyed question, and has featured for some time in trust polling such as that undertaken by Edelman and Gallup. But this uses a particular understanding of ‘the media’ to refer to what we previously called the mass media: newspapers, radio and television. A different way of thinking about media has its roots in the work of Marshall McLuhan. In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan argued that the media are fundamental to shaping human culture, and that technologies are first and foremost extensions of our human capacities. As McLuhan put it, ‘The personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology’ (McLuhan, 1964, p. 23). Since the ways in which we communicate, and hence our culture, are embedded within the technological forms that we use, the media influence not only what we think but also how we think.

His work explored the proposition that how societies communicate with one another through media technologies in turn shaped both the society (the social body) and the individuals within it. In other words, media form shapes its content. For McLuhan, the key to understanding electronic culture is neither in the technologies themselves, such as machines or computers, nor in the uses of their content or alleged ‘effects’, since the content of a medium is always another medium: ‘the content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera … the “content” of writing or print is speech’ (McLuhan, 1964, p. 26). Rather, the key issue is to understand how media technologies subtly transform the environment in which humans act and interact. This is what is known as the ecological conception of media, one which strongly foregrounds its technological dimensions without necessarily becoming technologically determinist. [1]

One implication of a complex understanding of media and mediation is that it raises the issue of what it is that we have trust in. In terms of institutions, one may distrust the Catholic Church while trusting one’s local priest. A student may distrust government policies towards higher education yet have considerable trust in the lecturer who runs their first-year unit. A media consumer may distrust most media but trust the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. With regards to the question of trust in news, Stromback et. al. have observed that trust in news may entail trust in particular items of media content, trust in certain journalists, trust in particular news brands, trust in certain types of media (e.g. broadsheet newspapers), and trust in media in general (Stromback et al., 2020). If we further note that about 30% of news I accessed through social media platforms which have their own trust dimesnions,w e can see how complex a seemingly straightforward question can become.

A general claim in the trust literature is that trust tends to be inversely related to scale and relationality: the closer people or agencies are to us, the more likely we are to trust them, and the more distant or remote they are perceived to be, the less they are trusted. An interesting implication is whether trust can be extended beyond the scale of the nation-state. As governance institutions seek to extend beyond nation-states, will they be less trusted by citizenries that remain essentially national — as argued, for instance, by Hosking (2014). And if so, what does this mean for attempts to establish systems of global governance that respond to the entities which are governed becoming increasingly transnational in their operations (corporations, digital platforms, universities etc.)?

[1] The criticism of McLuhan as a technological determinist was most notably made in Williams (1974).

References cited

Hosking, G. A. (2014). Trust: A History. Oxford University Press.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The Extensions of Man. Bantam.

Mollering, G. (2006). Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity. Elsevier.

Nau, H. H. (2005). Institutional, evolutionary and cultural aspects in Max Weber’s social economics. Papers in Political Economy, 49(2), 127–142.

Stromback, J., Tsfati, Y., Boomgaarden, H., Damstra, A., Lindgren, A., Vliegenthart, R., & Lindholm, T. (2020). News media trust and its impact on media use: Toward a framework for future research. Annals of the International Communication Association, 46(2), 139–156.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society (2 vols.) (8th ed.). University of California Press.

Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Routledge.

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