Reading Trust and Distrust in Shared Documents: Film Professionals Review Film Reviews

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 authenticity 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 somewhat 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.