Trust and Visuality: Everyday digital practices

We are witnessing a paradigm shift in the role, functions, interpretations and implications of visuality in all areas of social life - images, videos and other types of visuals as well as visualization techniques have become ubiquitous. Yet, visuality has always been entangled in complicated ways with truth, trust and trust relations. Are we witnessing an epistemic shift in how technology, visuality and trust intersect? This project addresses the entanglements of trust, visuality and technology, to analyze a seemingly everyday paradox between trusting and not trusting with visuals. Building on the lessons from existing literature and into the gaps between, our objective is to study how technologically and visually mediated trust is enacted in everyday, mundane situations, arguing that an epistemic change, if evident, sits in the everyday. Our central research question is “how is visually and digitally mediated trust enacted in everyday practices?” We answer it through four case studies, each conducted in two of the four participating countries (Austria, Estonia, Finland and the UK) to allow for diversity, depth and cross cultural comparison. Our choice of case studies emerges from a need to analyze both - people's trust ecosystems as complex relational contexts, and to zoom into three key arenas within that ecosystem. Thus our case studies focus on:
- how people enact visually mediated trust when it pertains to their health and to the medical institution
- how people enact visually mediated trust when it pertains to news and the media institution
- and how people enact visually mediated trust when it pertains to home curation on Pinterest
- and finally, for the contextual perspective - people's everyday trust relations and trust practices
In its focus on ordinary and everyday visual practices, this is innovative research with significant implications for a range of professions.