Aggregated together to form community, Flickr’s identity representations turn into a sort of externalized collective memory. According to Misztal, collective memories affect trust building in a community because they “like customs, traditions and habits, can be seen as constant efforts to maintain and reconstruct societal stability” (Misztal, 1995:140). A legible and uniting past manifested as the aggregate of photostreams establishes a web of interpersonal trust bonds within the community through its characteristics of an externalized collective memory (Misztal, 1995). The performativity of a Flickr profile is thus twofold in that it upholds trust partly through visibility and partly through externalized memory. The “Barnesian” performative aspect reveals itself as we contrast the new level of visibility with the “suspicious” lack thereof.
PERFORMATIVITY AND TRUST Luhmann’s (1979) main argument is that in order to maintain trust despite the everincreasing complexity of modern society, we must develop and refine our “system trust” and establish a stronger familiarity with abstract regulatory systems, which in turn implies leveraging “traditional” ways of trusting within the context of modern society. Giddens similarly states that trust in the multiplicity of abstract systems is a necessary part of everyday life today (Giddens, 1994). The principles and mechanisms of these abstract systems are opaque and cryptic for the average user. But we still take them for granted, and do not even notice their pervasive presence. The web is one of the places where the increasing reliance on—and trust in—such abstract systems is highly visible today. As Misztal argues in her discussion of trust as habitus, the shift towards system trust develops in a constant interaction between overarching institutional structures and the actions of individuals—hence Misztal’s interpretation of trust as a specific type of habitus. Seen in this light, the identity representation plays a key role in the transformation of trust in online social spaces since it is the mediator between the individual and the system, the user and the service. Although an increasing social complexity demands more systems for the mediation of trust, another tendency is also prevalent. That is the tendency of socio-cultural fragmentation and relativisation. Misztal (1995:123) notes in her discussion of reputation that “in the modern world, instead of one common ‘canon of 96