Dr. Turnbull encouraged us to think about trust issue in IM.
According to Andy Oram (2001), "Information conveyed via a long chain", "trustworthy or not, is generally viewed to be less trustworthy", therefore, "essentially, we are able to increase trust by reducing the number of people that must be trusted". Most of all, "even if there is high risk, if the potential consequences are not that bad, we may sitll be willing to trust"(p. 243).
In light of his argument, IM may be regarded trustful, because IM transfers information directly, even almost same time, and even if IM has risk to divulge a credit card number, many people in the world use IM because of its fantastic benefits that we learned in IM class this week.
That IM has lots of users reflects IM has earned good reputation, which supports trust of IM as well.
Posted by judith at April 11, 2003 08:05 PM