Contenu du sommaire : Confiance et communication

Trusting another person always implies having some form of dependence on him/her. Yet trusting someone whom one has known for a long time is different from surrendering oneself to the goodwill of a stranger. It is only, however, after one has taken a chance on a person that the latter can feel duty-bound to prove worthy of such trust. Thus, trust, instead of being the a posteriori consequence of loyalty, is its condition.

Restoring the subjective dialectic of belief to trust involves a question : in the actions and being of the other, what is found to be trustworthy ? There is a wager on otherness, one that is demonstrated in friendship and culminates in love, thereby sustaining the social bond. Here, this ethics of the subject is illuminated by the resources of unconscious knowledge, thereby bringing out the symbolic order, which is expressed in legal terms by the oath and the “sworn statement.” It is also illustrated by the legal framework of the “fideicommissum.” Ultimately the rotten apple in the barrel of trust, the process of ceasing to believe – which goes beyond disbelief – is what sheds light on both the conflicts involved in trust and what is at stake in this trust. We can follow the symptomatology of this process in the “social passions,” such as acute forms of resentment and the development of practices of systematic suspicion, a distrust that feeds a collective form of paranoid discourse that is based on the premise of the Other's imposture. This puts theories of language and communication to the test, by way of the dimension of reciprocation. The clinic of the subject reveals the paradox of subjects who invariably repeat situations of betrayal, in which the capital of their trust is spent at a loss. In this, we can recognize the work of the death drive : the unbinding and destructiveness at the very heart of the bond.

This essay begins with a discussion of the main sociological interpretations of the trusting attitude and then focuses on one of its levels : trusting familiarity in the structures of the lived world.

The conditions for mutual understanding are not created by speech that flows easily, and even less by accelerated speech. Communication that is too fast and the constant exchange of too much information can even produce acute forms of disorientation. This is why an ethics of tele-communicative action is necessary. Although digital technologies allow time to speed up, an act of communication – which cannot be reduced to a simple exchange of information – must always occur over a span of time. It always takes time to build trust between people, to get to know others, and to construct a social bond ; it also requires a desire to share the same space at a particular moment. In the digital age, we are truly experiencing a metamorphosis of public space, for we are witnessing the emergence of reticular public spheres ; therefore, it is necessary to examine the material and sensory conditions of their fulfillment.

In the last elections, the historic rate of abstention can be linked, first of all, to the narrative of distrust that the French people have expressed towards the figure of the president. This loss of confidence in the head of state, which itself was virtually absent before the oil crisis, has become a distinctive characteristic of presidential terms, especially once these were shortened to five years. It feeds primarily on the lack of positive socioeconomic results. Presidents have trouble with “changing the lives” of the French people, a change that is at the heart of campaign promises and the political imaginary in France. This plays a part in maintaining the suspicion that nothing is being done, which is reinforced when criticism focuses on broken promises. Such perceived weakness contributes to the wearing away or even the destruction of the bond of trust between representatives and those they represent. In this context, the result is mass abstention, which is increasingly based on the sense that voting is pointless or futile.

This article explores the problematic of trust relationships among state institutions – especially the prefectural institution – opinion leaders, and civil society as a whole, in the context of the triple crisis of public health, the economy, and society that has been sweeping the country since March 2020.The term “trust [confiance]” is scattered through any number of pieces of legislation and it has been a key word in public debates on COVID-19. We examine how the prefectural institution uses communication as a means of setting up relations of trust, in order to make the population adhere to the public health measures that are to be applied. The relation to institutions has long been conceived in Foucauldian terms, focusing on the effects of social control ; our research, drawing on that of Alexis Spire, is concerned with another aspect of state institutions : the “trust that they elicit.” This article takes up the connection to the state in relational terms.

The article begins with an examination of the concept of trust. Following the work of Niklas Luhmann, we argue that the main role of trust is to reduce the complexity of the events and situations with which an individual is confronted. We then turn our attention to the factors that have the greatest influence on the level of trust that residents place in managers of regional risk. The author's research into the risks related to both coastal flooding and sites of hazardous material storage regulated by the European Union's Seveso Directives has allowed three main factors to be identified. First, residents of areas subjected to these risks tend to put more trust in the people and institutions that are geographically and institutionally closest to them. Next, the degree of credibility accorded to managers depends on an appraisal of their competence. The third criterion is ethical. Residents place more trust in entities that put their safety first and cannot be suspected of being motivated by other goals, such as economic profitability. Thus, in order for information provided by public officials and other risk managers to be considered credible, these actors must be seen as possessing these three qualities.

Beyond the social discourse that stigmatizes and even constructs fantasies about how young people are subject to fake news and conspiracy theories, a question arises : to what extent do adolescents and young adults trust the information that circulates on the platforms they use ? How can critical thinking skills for information and communication be developed without producing a culture of distrust of the media and their messages ?

Trust has a central place in the military, particularly in its exercise of command (Leboyer, 2013). The armed forces have a “common sense of culture, values, and symbolism, and these form a whole that, constructed over the course of a long and rich history, provides a solid basis for trust” (Lezon, 2017). This trust is inseparable from command. The digitization of the battlefield and the use of digital platforms have changed how command is exercised (CEIS, 2015) and have had an impact on decisionmaking, on individuals, and on commands.The results of our qualitative field study of 37 officers on the French army's general staff show that trust in military officers is communicated by leading by example ; it is constructed in dedicated discursive spaces ; it is given to those who are trustworthy and accept the attendant communicational responsibilities. In their practices of managerial communication, military leaders generally dispense with digital platforms in order to enter into a relationship with the “other” and to build a network of trust with their subordinates.

The strategic field of crisis management relies on both familiarity with information and decision-making in order to master the criticality of situations. In an era of overwhelming mass information, these two dimensions require the development of “intelligent” software agents that are able to select, consolidate, and represent relevant information and to suggest solutions quickly. These agents are making steady progress and moving towards ever-greater autonomy. However, experts in crisis management and these artificial intelligence systems must continue to work together in a collaborative manner. Expected improvements depend on progress in the interaction between humans and intelligent machines, an area in which many issues have been identified. The notion of trust is central for the dynamic duo of human and system. Several factors that favor its enhancement are discussed in this article.

The communication and diffusion of information that incorporates “computational authority” form an algorithmic ecosystem in which trust is always being called into question. This concerns systems that, in reticular digital environments, create hierarchies, organize information, and sometimes even make decisions, all while constructing new authority figures. This article explores several facets of computational authority and seeks to identify means of creating or restoring trust in platforms and mechanisms based on information technologies.

This article explores prostitution practices among men on the internet. It describes ways of acting that differ greatly from those found in traditional prostitution ; this involves reconfigured modes of encounter and temporality, the social proximity between male sex workers and their clients, or the simulacrum of a romantic relationship. The analysis examines how, in these circumstances, the terms of a minimally trusting relationship – without which all sex for hire would be more impossible than ever – have changed. The article goes on to show the extent to which the alteration of prostitution relations sheds light on an aspect of our era : although it may have become a rallying cry, trust – understood as a communicational act that engages and establishes self and other in the same movement – has never appeared to be so fragile.

In 2019, Ayaka Fujii, a researcher in mechano-informatics, developed a system for “co-eating” with a robot. Stemming from research into persuasive technology, the system extends a whole series of experiments in which mealtime is made into a moment of exchange, even if only in one's imagination. Over the past decade in Japan, a country that has a high rate of unmarried adults, “digital commensality” has become a very active area of research. It allows people who are alone to “share” meals on-screen with other people, artificial creatures, or robots. Why would we trust and rely on such tools ? Why, especially, are illusions treated as “solutions” ?

This article adopts the perspective of trust in order to examine the relations between young audiences and expert media discourse on healthcare. Studying a corpus of 4,268 comments generated by three video interviews with experts about COVID-19 vaccinations – interviews that were published on the French online media site, Brut – we analyzed how this expert speech is both relied upon and distrusted by commenters. Such speech is rejected not only because it embodies disputed authority (the state, science, the pharmaceutical industry, the media), but also because of a refusal to trust out of necessity, a solution that would eliminate the possibly of making choices.

The “science of big data” and data-driven journalism are frequently linked because they arise from the same effort to incorporate data into the practices of producing information. However, they stem from epistemological approaches that are difficult to reconcile with one another. While some find that big data, with its incommensurable datasets, has a monopoly on correlation without causation, data journalism appeals to standardized data to justify the truth of its statements. From this perspective, data must be reprocessed and tested in the field in order to become meaningful. Data does not speak for itself, as can be seen in the first great investigations that marked the early days of data journalism.

In addition to his novels, scripts and plays, Jean-Claude Carrière also wrote books on storytelling relying on his work as a teacher, particularly in the French cinema school la Fémis. The book entitled Exercice du scénario, written with Pascal Bonitzer, could be considered as a classical manual in the sense that it will give clues and keys to students and learners wishing to write fiction for screen. Nevertheless, the word “exercise” in its title is singular, meaning that the book is not really about training sessions but more about how we exercise this profession and how it must be exercised.