Many users are anonymous today but that is also paralleled with a huge amount of people establishing pseudo-identeties online that stay intact across services (i.e. I have the “same” identity on flickr as on upcoming.org). By building an identity that moves across several web-sites it gains acceptance and recognition as something disconnected from a service and connected to the individual. ClaimID.com is an interesting way of trying move the identity from the service (or “the identity silo” as Dick Hardt calls them in his nice identity 2.0 presentation) to the hands of the user.

The issue of velocity is really important for trust, however, in some regards I could argue that non-mediated social interactions are much faster than ones mediated through the web. Furthermore trust is a wide and complex social phenomenon that at times can be slow to build up but in other contexts can be instantaneous. E.g. you sit at a cafe with your 2000USD laptop and have to go outside to have a cigarette – what do you do? You ask the person sitting next to you to keep an eye on your stuff. Actually you trust somebody you never met with something of large value to yourself just because he/she was sitting next to you. Why? Since the context provides an element of trust (maybe you feel connected with the ambience of the cafe) you extend that connection to the person within that context. So, trust can be instantaneous on a person-to-person level but will usually have a background in another element (a social object, place etc.).

The biggest amount of internet users in fact are anonymous, since they can not be differentiated from other users with same names and same interestst, and with growing access to internet the data gets “mashed up” even more.

The only way out would be context-sensitive web, which is a dream of web2.0 – but which is counteracted spam even more.

But coming back to the whole question of trust.

New encounters normally are not trusted. Trust is something, that develops over time. Now the interesting question is whether our analogue understanding of trust in time can be adopted to the instantly acting internet with is velocity of action. If we trust instantly – we will be disappointed (ever thought about ordering viagra from one of these spam-mails?) and if we don’t we are not acting conforming to the needs of the media.

The parallel with the virus industry is really interesting, hadn’t thought about that. There would surely be a constant battle between true and spam/annoying/evil-spirited agents but since the “key” to deciphering the authentic information is to actually know the person (or know certain facts about him/her) I think the evil guys would have a hard time… At least I hope so!

And with that I see parallels with the whole virus industry. With the one side trying to discover flaws and the other trying to correct them. An ever lasting battle.