Reading Trust and Distrust in Shared Documents: Film Professionals Review Film Reviews Natasha Dwyer * Victoria University Melbourne, Victoria, Australia natasha.dwyer@vu.edu.au Tom Clark Victoria University Melbourne, Victoria, Australia tom.clark@vu.edu.au Piotr Cofta British Telecom Martlesham Heath, U.K. piotr@bt.com Abstract This research explores how one group of users perceives trustworthiness and reliability, as a form of professional judgment, when viewing text based information that is shared and distributed publically. In particular, this research explores how trust works in the domain of film exhibition and curating. A group of film professionals were studied to explore how they navigate published information that the film industry produces. The trust at stake in this context seems to be the credibility and the authentic- ity of the information. Participants were sensitive to the interplay between what could be described as ‘factual material’ and its representation by different writers. Each participant had developed some- what different heuristics over the span of their professional practice. We find that once more basic strategies to inform trust are considered, the design of trust becomes complex and contradictory. This finding can be extrapolated to other groups who share documents professionally. Keywords: Trustworthiness, Trust-enablement and Performing Trust 1 Introduction Our paper explores from an interactive design perspective how one group of users perceives trustwor- thiness and reliability, as a form of professional judgment, when viewing text based information that is shared and distributed publically. We investigate how trust works in the specific context of film exhi- bition and curating, however, we argue that our conclusions can be extended into other contexts. Open and distributed platforms share several characteristics that designers of these systems have to work with. There is a wealth of information available to users, however the designer of this type of system may have little control over what users do with the information. Publically-accessible databases allow users to innovate with content in ways not possible before. For instance, users of a film institution website may take images from a site and create their own narratives. Power hierarchies between ‘owners’ and ‘users’ of content are disrupted. These aspects of distributed systems affect the trust relationships between users, the system, and the system owner. Our research investigates one piece of this complex puzzle: how film professionals demonstrate trust, as judged by other experts. Trust can be loosely and informally described as a relationship within which a trustor is confident that another party (the trustee), to whom a trustor is in a position of vulnerability, will respond in the trustor’s interests [5]. Trust in a technical environment permits a categorical, taxonomic approach to analysis. For instance, practitioners make judgments about the trustworthiness of a computer system that can be assured through technical means. They also assess the trustworthiness of the provenance of information. Critically, they also assess trustworthiness based on the nature of the information itself. As the internet is increasingly becoming an uncombed pool of information, this last type of trustworthiness is becoming more prominent, and is sometimes the only means of assessment a trustor has at hand. Trust, Journal of Internet Services and Information Security (JISIS), volume: 1, number: 4, pp. 110-119 * Corresponding Author: Victoria University, Ballarat Road, Footscray, Victoria, Australia (Phone: +61 404843106) 110