Trust in the digital age

In a world ruled by social networking sites and digital technology, our ability to trust those on the other side of the connection has gone extremely low that we sometimes doubt the profiles and accounts of our own friends and relatives.

Megan Meier, a victim of cyber bullying and spam accounts who was pointed to in David Grazian's book, was fooled in believing that the person she was in contact with on her MySpace account was real. Though she never discovered the truth, the fake account, which she was bullied through, was made by her previous friend’s mother! Doesn’t this make you think twice about adding strangers to your profiles and online accounts? Or to be more specific, doesn’t it make you hesitate to add too much personal information on your online profiles? 

Although we might be honest about our own personal information in these sites, Grazian pointed to the others who exaggerate and strategically design their online profiles and behaviors in self-interested ways-As most teenagers now measure their popularity by the number of friends they have on Facebook. The damage incurred by those spam profiles and accounts take many forms and have different motives behind them. Megan’s case demonstrates one of the forms that these profiles could be used in, while in the movie Trust it takes a different path though it presents a similar situation.

The movie is not that much different then what happened to Megan. As, fourteen year old, Annie, meets her first boyfriend online and-unsurprisingly-she finds out that he is not what he originally claimed to be.

The ease with which information flows online among otherwise discrete interpersonal networks has obvious consequences for how we maintain control over our reputation and identity as mentioned in Grazian's book. One of those consequences is cyber bulling which is now more common among young people.

Unlike physical bullying, electronic bullies remain virtually anonymous using temporary email accounts and other social networking ways to mask their identity according to Wikipedia. The feeling that they are not being supervised frees their behaviors form any sense of responsibility. Moreover, when teenagers know more about computers and technology than their parents do, they are able to operate them without concern that the parent will discover their experience with bullying.