Mere social presence presupposes trust and expands as trust accumulates

Evidence

Since all communication, indeed every perceivable form of behaviour, says something about the person who is behaving, communication – even merely being seen by others – is a risky undertaking which requires some kind of safeguard. An individual’s behaviour always gives away more information about himself than he can reconcile with his ideal self and more than he consciously wants to communicate. Thus, his mere appearance presumes some minimum trust, trust that he will not be misinterpreted, but that he will be accepted by and large in the guise he wishes to appear. There are people who experience this prerequisite site of trust to such an extreme degree that they have difficulty merely being – let along doing anything – in the presence of other people. Their sphere of action is limited in proportion to their lack of trust and, furthermore, inability to show trust limits their chances of winning trust. The possibilities for action increase proportionately to the increase in trust – trust in one’s own self-presentation and in other people’s interpretation of it. When such trust has been established, new ways of behaving become possible – jokes, unconventional initiatives, bluntness, verbal short cuts, welltimed silences, the choice of delicate subjects etc. When trust is tested and proven in this way, it can be accumulated by way of capital. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 187

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Giddens’s ‘facework’ commitments — trust embedded in co-present interaction and self-presentation, the very layer Stevens abandons for faceless system trust. — connects to: Response presence can sustain intersubjective social forms across global distances — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 33
• DEFINE: Defines the minimal social trust that underwrites all face-to-face interaction, the baseline against which ‘faceless commitments’ are contrasted.