Technology and Social Structure

In the last chapter, we reviewed how the dynamics of sidewalks can create trust or distrust. In this chapter, we move to the digital realm. The implications from moving to physical to digital is inevitably people begin to interact with even wider range of people, in addition to who they usually interact with on a day-to-day basis, creating and maintaining more "weak ties" and investing trust in the weak ties more.

As we mentioned in previous chapters on the social exchange theory and the definitions and measurement of trust, there is a spectrum from micro to macro focus. The middle ground there is the embedded approach, accelerated by the development of social networks since 1970s. Since 1970s, research on social networks have been progressing, and together with commercial social network platforms such as Facebook gain popularity, it is suggested that our social structure is experiencing fundamental change -- and as a result social behaviors and trust experiencing drastic changes, too.

Overall, people are able to maintain more weak ties [1]. Our understanding of weak ties has also advanced over the years, from viewing it less important to recognizing the information and structural value in weak ties [2]. While general trust (i.e., trust in institutions and society) is on decline over the years [3], we have seen the increasing level of people trusting each other in the embedded settings, e.g., staying at stranger's homes on Airbnb (or letting strangers stay in their homes), buying and selling things on the Internet (eCommerce, Craiglist, Facebook buy-and-sell groups). Thus studying the embedded trust becomes more and more important, which is why my work focuses on embeddedness trust.

Research first recognized the importance of weak ties around 1970s. In 1973, Granovetter published a seminal paper on social networks -- The Strength of Weak Ties [2]. In the paper, Granovetter defined two different types of social ties -- strong tie (close friends and families) and weak tie (acquaintances). Through induction, such as triadic closure, and empirical evidence, Granovetter showed that weak ties (as opposed to strong ties) have important implications for information diffusion, mobility opportunity, and community organization [2]. This new focus on weak ties, and network models that examine relationships between groups created a sea change. For example, in the study in the economic actions, Granovetter bridged the macro and micro views by proposing to focus on embeddedness [4].

Entering the digital revolution, three big changes had fundamental impact on people's daily lives -- social network revolution, the Internet revolution, and the mobile revolution [1]. The term "networked individualism" was coined [1] to represent the shift of classical social structures of formal organizations or small tightly-knit groups, to connected individuals, using the means provided by information technology. Networked individuals are members of diverse groups in which they use one group to seek emotional support, and another to participate in a specific interests with (e.g., going bowling, rather than joining a bowling league [3]). The peer-to-peer economy platforms build directly off these digital revolutions, leveraging both the technological infrastructure, as well as people's willingness to engage in social activities online. The difference between peer-to-peer economy and social networks is usually the direct monetary exchange involved, and thus things are at high stake, which is also why trust is important.

Where digital meets physical

The physical environment meets the digital layer in some ways in influencing trust.

We reviewed in the last chapter that physical spaces can shape the social behaviors and trust in public spaces, wifi networks in addition, can reconfigure the space and impact how people interact (or not interact) in public spaces. Works like Alone Together by Sherry Turkle [5] has criticized the use of digital devices in co-located spaces reduce face-to-face interactions, making people less engaged in the physical world -- hurting interpersonal trust. However the connectivity may have mixed effects on social interactions -- some people use connectivity to be more isolated and productive, some others use the connectivity to make space and hang out [6], both suggesting divergent futures for connected social interaction in public spaces [7].

Finally, I want to briefly mention the latest technology of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) and their potential on impacting interpersonal interactions and trust in the public. AR technology can place virtual 3D objects through the smart camera lenses and VR technology can transport users into a virtual 3D space via wearing a headset. AR and VR have both, recently, become accessible to mainstream consumer mobile devices (e.g., Google ARCore, Apple's ARKit, Oculus Go, Samsung Gear, Google Daydream View). Both AR and VR have the potential to change how people interact in the public, and it will be an interesting area of research that I will monitor closely on.

References