When Technology Draws Society: Distributed Trust in Horizontal Infrastructure

The authors present a research based in Spain and carried out between 2011 and 2014 on the social organizations and affective processes involved in social movements. Using extracts from narrative interviews, they explore how participants in social protests cross attachment and technology in order to develop trusting relationships. The way they propose to analyse the issue of trust in social organizations is to examine the discursive construction of the links between the attachment of actors and the use of different technologies. The narrative was recorded in an event that was organised in the city of Madrid in 2014. The analysis is organised in three parts. The first step is to introduce the first approach to constructing the horizontal infrastructure. In the second step, the authors show how good practice stimulates social organizations to create the perfect environment to distribute trust. In the last step, they present technology and society zigzagging together to achieve a common purpose. They consider technology as a marker of the emergence of new forms of cooperation and innovation constructed by shared trust among the actors involved in social organizations. They introduce a specific device, where expert knowledge contributes to the very definition and shaping of the trust within social organizations.