Trust And Visuality: Everyday digital practices (TRAVIS)

The ongoing crisis of trust in specific institutions (government, media, healthcare system) is often blamed for many of the social, cultural and political problems European societies are currently facing. While many researchers are exploring the relations between trust, technology and misinformation, we need to understand how trust is practiced in our everyday, ordinary lifes and media practices. Trust And Visuality: Everyday digital practices (TRAVIS) is a research project that will look at how people experience, build and express trust in images of wellbeing and health on social media. We chose this focus for three reasons: First, humans experience visual information as more trustworthy than other communicative modes. Second, while trust continues to be crucial for social life, it is significantly complicated by our increasing reliance on online communication, where we have to infer our communication partners and their intentions from their on-screen representations and algorithmic manipulation. And finally, the pandemic showed us that visual digital representations related to our individual (step counts, recovery selfies) and collective (visualizations of infection rates) experiences of health are increasingly central to our lives. This makes everyday, visual social media communications of health news and personal health content the perfect case study to understand trust. Thus, TRAVIS investigates how and why people trust some visual digital content over other, and how content creators and professionals create trustworthiness with and through digital visual content. Our research is undertaken in four different cultural contexts - Austria, Estonia, Finland and the UK - allowing us to combine perspectives from Nordic, Eastern-European/Post-Soviet, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic cultures, each with their own traditions and norms of trust as well as significant differences in how much institutions are trusted. To ensure the social impact of our research findings, TRAVIS cooperates with various local initiatives. Together we will increase awareness, knowledge and skills about trustworthy, bias-free and socially responsible digital visuals, visualization practices (incl. computer-generated imagery technology) and the underlying mechanisms and social implications of the crisis of trust affecting Europeans lives.

Four Countries, One Finding: Online Trust Is Emotional, Fragile, and Never Individual New European Study Decodes How Visual Trust on Social Media Works What happens when doctors post on Instagram? When young adults turn to TikTok for mental health advice? When health advice is judged not only by facts, but by how something looks and feels? Across Europe, people make split-second judgments based on images they see online. But how do these visuals shape trust? Involving researchers at Tallinn University in Estonia, University of Salzburg in Austria, Tampere University in Finland and University of Oxford in the UK, TRAVIS (Trust and Visuality in Everyday Digital Practices) explored how people make sense of visual information in their daily lives and what this means for trust, especially in sensitive areas like health and wellbeing. We asked how social media users and content creators practice visual digital trust in their socially mediated everyday life, how trust practices are shaped by platforms and their affordances and what imbues some visual digital images with trustworthiness? Relying on a variety of data and methodological innovation, we analyzed user and content creator experiences, social media content and platforms. We found that trust is, to a large extent, not just information processing but accumulates from many aspects of social media use. This means that in the context of image-rich health communication on social media, trust is a matter of feelings, actual and imagined relationships with creators, presumed consensus with significant others, relations between images, how messages are communicated in terms of style and rhetoric and their factfulness. Trust is dynamic, easy to lose and emerges across different platforms. In short, visual digital trust is relational rather than individual, dynamic rather than static, emotional rather than rational and context-sensitive in various ways. While what things look like plays a key role in trust, there aren't really fool-proof visual cues of trustworthiness that will guaranteed that a post is trusted. And that is probably for the better, as those trust cues would inevitably be abused my manipulative actors. TRAVIS project publishes its findings widely, in both academic and popular venues, and the research team worked with health professionals, educators, platforms and public institutions. We are grateful to our Academic Advisory Board (Anthony McCosker, Sarah Banet Weiser, Stefania Vicari, Jill Walker Rettberg) and to our Cooperation Partners (Safer Internet Austria, Finnish Museum of Photography, Estonian Society of Family Doctors, Sirp newspaper, UK Safer Internet Centre South West Grid for Learning) for helping us make sene of the complexities of trust as well as distill actionable insights from this complexity. Project website (https://www.tlu.ee/en/bfm/researchmedit/trust-and-visuality-everyday-digital-practices-travis) LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/travis-trust-and-visuality-everyday-digital-pr%E2%80%A6 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/travis_research/