Trusting strangers? A theoretical view on trust formation in an online DIY environment

During the search for relevant information in the context of mass self-communication, people are increasingly being confronted with a lot of online content created by internet users who are not considered being typical experts (such as journalists, researchers or professional writers). Content creation is easier than ever with DIY social media tools and each user has - at least in theory - the opportunity to 'write' and disseminate. Besides the optimistic expectations about user empowerment, this abundance of (user generated) information raises questions concerning the issue of trust. People are increasingly connected but how do they differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy information online? In this paper we build up an understanding of the way trust is constructed in an online, creative community environment, starting from existing literature regarding trust in offline contexts. Current online trust research often focuses on the importance of trust for knowledge building in virtually dispersed teams or on the construction of trust in commercial e-commerce settings where confidence is needed to establish brand loyalty and encourage online purchases. Little attention however is paid to the role of trust and trustworthiness during the search for (reference) information such as how-to and self-aid recommendations. This theoretical paper offers an overview of traditional trust research and incorporates views from mediated interpersonal communication in order to underpin a construction of online trust and to overcome often-problematized issues such as the lack of face-to-face contact. Furthermore, we look at the traditional division between slow and swift trust and use these two concepts - which originate from classic organizational literature - to hypothesize that the way
trust in online advice is formed, depends on the kind of user or consumer. For this purpose, a user typology is formulated. The overall goal of this study is to extend the work on traditional trust research and to embed these classical views in an online search context.

Key words: user generated content, trust, virtual community, diy, search, user types.