Through all my 25 years of schmoozing and learning online, the issue of trust has remained what I consider to be the most important influence on the quality and importance of interpersonal communication. Extreme community has the local, in-person verification advantage for establishing, building and maintaining trust. Where-as in the online world you must always be wary and – to varying degrees – cautious when joining new communities or interacting with members of incidental communities, in the flesh you have so many other clues of one’s sincerity, honesty and attention.
Online, one must learn to balance your openness against your skepticism. Friends of friends may have a high reliability factor, but until you’ve had a certain level of verification through action with a person, you’re gambling to some degree. Doing stuff together speeds up the familiarity and trust building.
Frank Rich’s column today in the NYT put it squarely and irrefutably before us that we’ve been total suckers through this entire decade. We, as in the number of who care to a great enough degree about how large corporations pull so many strings to put incompetent and amoral clowns in high and influential places. Not just in America but around the world.
Rich think’s Time Magazine’s Person of the Year should have been Tiger Woods, almost as the typical intentional myth that defined the past decade.
As cons go, Woods’s fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us. But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over. A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth.