donkeymonkey

week 8 @h-ha : Trust Busters

I work with attorneys who quote wikipedia regularly for legal reference. 

 I never really directly considered how the quality of site formatting, navigation, and design would lend themselves to user ‘trust’ about the site, but now that I think about it, it’s alarmingly obvious.  As human animals, we make perceptions by appearance…with the web, in a way, the most discriminate social forum ever to come about.  If a site looks amateur and has jagged mapping and layout, we infer it was created by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.  which is, most likely, a true inference.

the Online Trust studies statistical findings came across as being gauged off a proprietary meter – I just found the tables very difficult to assess.  The questions of the study, I found, were very interesting however…in that I expect there’s a large percentage of online users who may never bother to stop and consider several of them.  The Information Age bombards us with information.  Verifying your sources becomes tedious and exhausting in a short amount of time.  I know for myself, the only item I ever tend to inspect are privacy policies for mailing lists, shareware, and to see if the lockbox appears on a page when I’m providing credit card info.  In terms of data, I think we, as researchers, need to open our minds to the concept that there’s a wealth of information out there that is not academic or professional but may be the only information available. 

Relating this discussion of credibility to online health sources, the subject could even be said to be life-threatening.  I don’t know of anyone who’s sought out medical advice in a chat room, but then again, it’s probably not the type of activity someone would readily admit to.  The danger here is the selectibility of information, online sources with varying info allow users to essentially choose whatever diagnosis they like, rather than having it made for them as it ideally should be.  Someone with a lump in their breast, afraid to find out the worst, could very easily go to a chat room and hear someone else’s story that theirs was benign, and decide that this must also be the case for her. 

Q’s :   

-How do we determine credibility of online information if it’s being provided by a sole author?

- What is the advantage of ‘non-traditional’ sources of information (i.e. sources that can’t verify their authenticity)?

-The more online-active we are, do we become less trusting or more trusting of visited sites?

1 Comment so far
Leave a comment