Socrates, Trust and the Internet

O'Hara, Dr Kieron (2003) Socrates, Trust and the Internet.

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Socrates, one of the world’s greatest philosophers, never wrote anything, and confined all his philosophy to spoken debate. The important issues for Socrates were trust and control: he felt the radical decontextualisation that resulted from the portability and stasis of written forms would obscure the author’s intentions, and allow the misuse of the written outside of the local context. Trust has once more become a central problem, both politically and epistemologically, but since Socrates’ day, various technologies have undermined his distinction, making the relationship between trustworthiness and linguistic mode more complex. In this paper, I review the state of the art in Internet technologies, showing (a) how developers and authors attempt to establish trust in their websites or e-commerce processes, and (b) how new work in dynamic content creation further blurs the spoken/written and global/local distinctions.

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