This write up is including my personal thoughts on social trust and personal data, I got inspired to write down some thoughts after reading this article by Dan Finlay
How we pick who to trust in this world?
There are so many people that we have to trust whether those people are managing our money, take care of our health or a house cleaner who gets a key from our private property. Thanks to social media, we can build trust over distance.
We all born blind, at the beginning of your life we were exploring the world with our senses while our brains don’t know what to make of the neutrons that fire across your brain in response to this new thing called “light”.
Over time we learned how to trust our senses, in meaning for example not to touch something that’s hot because we will burn our skin. Later on, as we grow up we learn who to trust, whether we are talking about bank — where to put our savings, or health — which doctor will take care of our health, or politicians- who will do the right decisions for us in meaning of leading the state and take care of the governances in state where we live.
We have access to more information than anyone in history, but we haven’t learned how to manage them.
We have access to huge social networks but only a few of us can control and benefit from them. Why? Because we love to use social networks for entertainment, but I like to call it wasting a time that can be used for learning (don’t hate me for being so honest). Truth is that you can benefit from social media by procrastinating purposely, in meaning that you’re looking for more information, watching people how they react on posts, watching the discussions.. or looking for more information (like this one). You may not be aware of how powerful social media are these days because there are people that are paid for controlling what you see, like, comment… just do a little research about it.
How we are going to establish trust and governing with our life?
There are some possibilities of how we can do it — we don’t have to trust banks, we can put our savings in crypto and control the money by ourselves. But this theory can’t be applied to everything. We still have to trust people it’s a chain of command and this is also a chain of trust — it’s up to everyone else to do was they’re asked. For example, you give money to a charity and hope that they will use your money for the purpose you gave them money — as soon as the funds are out of your hands, you just hoping that they’re still in your interest.
There are so many platforms out there where the value is crowd-sourced and they’re using our reviews, purchases.. basically, our data to improve products, services that we are using daily. Which is great, I’m not blaming anyone to do so and extra points to the opt-out/ opt-in buttons that I can use when I don’t want to share my personal data. Companies or even your personal devices are using the same logic that allows people to extend their financial trust and it applies to literally any power at all, from basic permissions like accessing to your phone camera or notes to your bank account. Google, Facebook, Instagram, and other companies are using our data and making shit tons of money off it. As we digitalize our life we are increasing numbers for those companies to use our personal data, we are enabling new kinds of collaboration and crowdfunding that don’t even need to be based on money but can be based on the actual capacities we require to thrive and succeed at our most ambitious goals.
There’s huge social collateral that’s available for us to thrive our life in a new direction, we have to be aware that our life is based on data, we can easily sense the troubles, we can ask for help but our data can be hacked. Be aware of it.
Disclaimer
I don’t want to scare anyone to not use social media, to have zero trusts to people, friends, their doctors or whoever. I just wanted to throw some thoughts about trust, social capital, and data usage so people will think about it. Those are just my personal notes on this topic, maybe a bit messy but it was a pretty quick, morning write up.
