Understanding the societal and business perspectives of online trust literacy in the context of digitalization

Abstract

The spread of digital culture is one of the biggest reprogramming of humanity, radically transforming our economic, social, and cultural models. One of the keys to success of this transformation, and to preventing the spread of digital divides, is the development of a variety of literacies. These literacies describe the success of society and business to thrive in the digital space. In this article, we introduce a new concept of action literacy (online trust literacy) and examine its functioning from both a social and a business perspective through two primary research studies. After defining the phenomenon, we examine it from two sides: the first part examines the dimensional structure of trust from the perspective of society (through a large, representative sample-based survey), while the second part analyses the building and operational mechanisms of trust from a business perspective (through a small sample of exploratory data collection). The main implications of this study are to demonstrate the Janus-faced nature of this new kind of literacy and the ambiguity of digital culture to better understand the toolset of information recipients and providers. The result of our research is the introduction of a new concept of action literacy and its operationalisation, resulting in an interpretation matrix.