Ecommerce's Monthly Talking Point: January 1999 Trusty Communities Mass market ecommerce has highlighted afresh the most stubborn barrier to free human interaction: the issue of trust. Our societies function by exchange - of labour, value, opinion and a host of other abstract and concrete commodities. There's no all-powerful arbiter sitting in the sky ensuring that everybody keeps their promises. (If there is, Nasa haven't bumped into him yet.) We live in a web of implicit contracts that underwrite our personal security and which go some way to ensuring the predictability of events. The trust that we exercise as consumers, or engender as producers, is the true business ether, the commercial medium in which transactions exist. If we're happy to exercise and engender trust in traditional settings, what freaks us about the Internet? We think that an encrypted credit card number must be insecure, whereas in the paper world we sign away our identities with a scribble. We'll put up with junk mail but fulminate about spam, even though the disposal costs of spam are better than those of junk mail, both personally and environmentally. I have a pet theory, which you're welcome to help me house-train... My theory is that the perceived anonymity of the net, and especially its famed non-ownership, is at the root of this distrust. It's not the technology as such that creates a barrier, but its incomplete socialisation. We've trained ourselves to project a more-or-less benign personality onto the tangible social world, and have developed a set of functional (although often arbitrary) rules for asserting the trustworthiness of any situation. A nice example here in England is that pedestrians generally show each other the utmost courtesy in their use of the pavement, but behave abusively in equivalent car traffic situations. Somehow cars transport people to a parallel world where competition, not co-operation, is the norm. The public is building a consensus that the net is a treacherous sea of slow-moving toxic sludge, inhabited by well-connected sharks. And this isn't necessarily a generational thing: when we point out the ease with which the young take to technology, we're highlighting games, not transactions. The real reason to build communities on the net is not to mine them for demographic nuggets. It's to create sectors of trust where societies can function properly. And well-built communities are the ones that attract businesses.

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© 1999 Paul May