Mediated Trust ARC Laureate
About
Professor Terry Flew was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellowship which commenced in February 2024. His Laureate Fellowship is Mediated Trust: Ideas, Interests, Institutions, Futures.
The ARC Laureate Fellowship is the most prestigious award of the Australian Research Council. It provides five-year funding for a program of research which:
- attract and retain outstanding researchers and research leaders of international reputation, with exceptional ability to lead, collaborate, mentor and supervise, and enhance their capacity to create an enduring legacy;
- build focus and scale in research by forging new links among researchers, the international research community and/or industry and other research end-users;
- support a program of innovative and ground-breaking research that addresses a significant problem or gap in knowledge;
- provide an excellent research training environment and exemplary opportunity to nurture early or mid-career researchers;
- produce new or advanced knowledge resulting from the outcomes of the research with economic, commercial, environmental, social and/or cultural benefits for Australia, and to enhance research in Australian Government priority areas.
Programs
The Mediated Trust ARC Laureate Fellowship is built around four research programs:
The ongoing financial difficulties of news organizations and decline in paid journalism roles has been accompanied by growing concerns about misinformation and “fake news”. While trust in journalists as a professional group has never been high, trust in news media has fallen in recent years, particularly with regards to “mainstream” sources.
This project aims to unpack the trust in news debate to identify different levels of trust in particular news brands, the relationship of trust to sustainable business models (e.g. subscription), the relationship of digital platforms and social media to news, and policy initiatives in the news area, from bargaining codes to news media subsidies. The program will develop comparative survey data in trust in news, complemented by semi-structured interviews with news media stakeholders in six countries.
Digital platform companies have become among the most powerful entities in the world, with some critics suggesting that Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla and others have a level of power akin to that of sovereign nation-states. This gives them a complex relationship to questions of trust, as they routinely exercise forms of conduct that demonstrate their power, without a clear sense of what forms of accountability, transparency and legitimacy lie behind such actions. In the context of a “regulatory turn” in global Internet governance, this is presenting a series of instances where the power of digital platforms finds itself in contestation with nation-state governance and forms of counter-power pursued by civil society organizations and other non-state actors (e.g. academic researchers).
This program will track such developments across major platforms, with Meta being of particular interest. It will consider the rise of quasi-independent forms of self-governance such as Meta’s Oversight Board, as well as industry self-regulatory and co-regulatory models as proposed alternatives to nation state regulation and multilateral forms of governance. It will involve a mix of interviews, text research and data analysis, critical discourse analysis, as well as comparative policy analysis of Australia, the European Union, Canada and the United States.
Institutions have been central to questions of trust in complex modern societies. As decision-making has increasingly been undertaken by and through institutions, questions of accountability, transparency and legitimacy have lay behind the impact and nature of such decisions, and the relationship between legal, cultural, economic and other institutions in different socio-political systems. But new challenges to institutional power and authority, and to established forms of expertise, arise in an age of both digital technologies and political polarization. The rise of populism has challenged the authority of traditional institutions and called for a more direct and unmediated relationship between “the people” and power. Moreover, international institutions exist alongside national ones, addressing challenges of a global nature ranging from climate change and public health to international trade and Internet governance.
This project will develop a comparative analysis of institutional responses to such challenges, with particular reference to responses in the Western liberal democracies as compared to emergent powers such as India and China.
After many decades of incremental development, the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have accelerated dramatically in recent years. Different countries have scrambled to respond to the challenges of AI, both seeking to develop their own capabilities in a perceived “global AI arms race” while also seeking to regulate these new technologies in the public interest, addressing issues ranging from potential job losses to privacy and data issues, misuse of the technologies, and safeguards over automated decision-making. With the rapid development of Generative AI, these technologies are now at the core of the media and creative industries, as well as education, raising new questions about what is “real” human creativity, and what is “fake” machine-generated content. There are also important challenges to the academic disciplines from the growth in human-machine communication, particularly around assumptions that digital technologies are tools in the communicative process, rather than having a degree of agency and autonomy in the meaning-making process.
This project will explore such issues from the perspective of trust, with particular reference to the relationship of computing discourses of “trusted systems” to trust as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences. It will also consider comparative policy approaches to safeguarding trust in the context of the rapid development of AI systems.
What is Mediated Trust?
Trust has been described as a feeling of safety and security; an attitude of way of thinking and disposition to action; and a relationship between a person and others, including groups, collective entities, and institutions. Trust has been described by economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Oliver Williamson as an invisible institution.
The sociologist Georg Simmel observed that in the absence of trust people have in one another, society would disintegrate, while Niklas Luhmann observed that in the absence of trust, it would be impossible to get out of bed of a morning. Yet the existence of trust is notoriously hard to measure and is more often observed in its absence than in its everyday role.
The philosopher Jon Elster has identified the lack of trust as something that can be seen after an event but often not before it, while the historian Geoffrey Hosking has described trust as akin to a coconut tree: it takes a long time to grow and flourish but can be swiftly and easily destroyed. An essential condition of trust is that it can be misplaced or betrayed, and hence is always accompanied by risk and uncertainty: it is fundamentally different to faith, belief or factual certainty.
Trust issues become more complex as societies become more complex. In particular trust is increasingly invested in institutions such as governments, businesses, political parties and the media as well as in individuals. The process of institutionalization discussed by sociologists such as Max Weber, Anthony Giddens and Lynne Zucker means that societal trust is increasingly disembedded from the trustworthiness that we may identify in individuals through our everyday interactions.
Communication is central to social trust, yet the communications discipline has analyzed questions of trust less than other social sciences. One communications concept which is central to understanding contemporary trust issues is mediatization, or the extent to which social relations and institutions increasingly operate in and through logics dictated by media institutions, practices and content. A concept such as post-truth, for example, is fundamentally a communications concept, as it tied the truth or falsehood of statements to the extent to which they are accepted or rejected through media amplification.
A central premise of the concept of mediated trust is that something has fundamentally changed in the contemporary public sphere linked to the rise of the Internet and digital technologies. In the media sphere, the downgrading of traditional media gatekeepers and the rise of ‘DIY’ forms of digital content creation fundamentally changes the manner in which information (including misinformation) flows through societies. More generally, the blurring of lines between experienced reality and that which is digitally mediated generate new forms of sociality and social identity, civic engagement, political polarization and cultural practice.
Mediated trust points to the relationship of trust to technology. Balasz Bodó has observed that there is both trust in technology and trust experienced through technology. Trust mediated through technology has increasingly preoccupied scientists and health professionals, as public acceptance of their findings is not only the result of epistemic consensus, but also shaped by the preparedness of citizens to accept the findings as they are relayed through media. Technologies such as Blockchain promise to eliminate the human element of trustworthiness, rendering contracts secure through data stored in decentralized machines.
The rise of artificial intelligence is testing our trust in technology, not only though its ability to replicate and ‘fake’ human activities, but because it means that humans and increasingly communicating with machines and not simply through them. It also challenges some core assumptions of communications as a field, most notably that our devices (media) are the tools through which humans interact with one another and shape the social environment. Machines that can think and learn further shift the frontiers of societal trust and make the challenges of understanding mediated trust more urgent.
Project Team
More on Mediated Trust
BACKGROUND READING
Items cited above:
Arrow, K. (2013). The Limits of Organization(5th ed.). W. W. Norton & Co.
Barbalet, J. (2019). Trust: Condition of action or condition of appraisal? International Sociology, 34(1), 83–98.
Bodó, B. (2021). Mediated trust: A theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators. New Media & Society, 23(9), 2668–2690.
Brown, W. (2023). Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber. Harvard University Press.
Elster, J. (1993). Political Psychology. Cambridge University Press.
Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press.
Hawley, K. (2019). How to be Trustworthy. Oxford University Press.
Hosking, G. A. (2014). Trust: A History. Oxford University Press.
Luhmann, N. (2017). Trust and Power (2nd ed.). Polity Press.
Möllering, G. (2001). The Nature of Trust: From Georg Simmel to a Theory of Expectation, Interpretation and Suspension. Sociology, 35(2), 403–420.
Nau, H. H. (2005). Institutional, evolutionary and cultural aspects in Max Weber’s social economics. Papers in Political Economy, 49(2), 127–142.
O’Neill, O. (2017). Intelligent Trust in a Digital World. New Perspectives Quarterly, 34(4), 27–31.
Simmel, G. (1990). The Philosophy of Money (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society (2 vols.) (8th ed.). University of California Press.
Williamson, O. E. (1993). Calculativeness, Trust, and Economic Organization,. Journal of Law and Economics, 36(3), 453–486.
Zucker, L. (1986). Production of Trust: Institutional Sources of Economic Structure, 1840-1920. Research in Organizational Behavior, 8(2), 53–111.
Link to Mediated Trust seminar program
Articles by Terry Flew on Mediated Trust
