The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

A significant factor is the writings of Joanne Yates and James Beniger (independent books), both looking at the development and evolution of business writing and communications from the 17th century onward (Beniger goes back further, Yates largely looks at the late 19th century onward, principally via DuPont). The nuggets of the idea formed reading those.

The reasons I feel the tendency may be generalisable is that the trend appears to be independent from any given technology, far more dependent on the factors of scale (amount of comms) and rates (one-way and round-trip information), and how systems respond given informational, control, and feedback cycles matching these descriptions. That is: it's a fundamental cybernetics / systems effect, not a response to any specific technology.

Keep in mind that "oh, I can trust people far more who I can stay in touch with by mail / phone / email / chat / SMS / voice chat / Skype ..." is actually a form of the argument I'm making. Yes, if you can rely on technology then those you can keep tabs on are more trustworthy. But that gain is relative to those whom you cannot, which is to say baseline trust is lower.

Maybe.

Then there's the problem that technically mediated information is itself no longer trustworthy. Analogue transmission and recording formats (photos, phonographs, film, phones) were fairly trustable in that they presented analogous representations of a ground truth (subject to framing, editing, selection, editing, and other effects). Computers are enabling fabrication of perceptually realistic media and signals, close to or at realtime in cases, to the extent that we cannot trust records or transmissions. The fact that information can be tuned to us (whether we want it to be or not) makes it inherently untrustworthy. Reality, as a rule, doesn't bias itself systematically to our preferences or weaknesses. Digital media does.

Media intermediates. Screens are projections, of our biases, the sender's biases, and the system / intermediaries' biases.

Reading this made me think of a situation with a non-adversarial notion of trust. It used to be that you could make plans with someone a week or two in advance, and generally just expect to show up at a place and time, and they'd be there without further coordination. Whereas now with instant communication, personal plans can be easily altered at a moment's notice, and so they will. (Of course my own getting older is a confounding factor here too...)

The larger effect you're describing feels like a different way of describing model "precession", in that once a state of affairs becomes taken for granted, the head of the pack/smarter agents/attackers (however you want to think of them) move to playing off those assumptions. Everyone else who is still "playing by the rules" then feels like their trust has been violated.

I'm drawing the distinction between general trends and specific technologies, because I feel the only thing you can get out of the general trend is to predict that we will have ever less societal trust over time (barring using it to indict technology in general ala Kaczynski). But is there an inherent problem with less trusting, IF the same thing can be accomplished with verification? Keep in mind, we don't necessarily account for all the people that previously got swindled because they had no choice but to trust, and that trust was betrayed! So it seems like the real "trust" crises arise when something we traditionally trust has been undermined, but without a corresponding better way to verify.

Looking at the specific course of mass news media - everyone kind of came to just trust what they were saying, so that trust became an asset to monetize (propaganda). Then as more people saw through their bullshit, their remaining audience became less critical, meaning they can lower their standards even further, setting up a feedback loop. Now the TV is down to base disaster porn and a political sporting arena.

Granted I do think there is an abstract point to be made that even if mass media was pushing detrimental propaganda to eg go to war or further other entrenched-interest goals, having everyone united on the same page can be valuable in and of itself. I just think that has to be evaluated on its own topical merits - like considering all of those remote victims of economic wars - rather than generally lamenting about trust.

(This comment got lost in a tab, and I didn't necessarily cover everything I wanted to. But I might as well late-reply with what I did write)