Branding Trust: The Ideology of Making Truth Claims through Interactive Media

Abstract

This chapter analyses how the Internet and Interactive TV might encourage a new culture of communications. Specifically, it investigates whether audiences are predisposed to trust the content of media that depend on participatory user relationships, and how important user interactivity is in the perceived authenticity of the end product. Based on empirical data collected between 2001 and 2006,¹ this study seeks to better define the fluid boundaries between users and producers of new media products through an analysis of the specific contexts within which interactive technologies are taken up. It investigates two disparate, international media brands: firstly, Big Brother, a constructed reality game show with audience interaction and secondly, Indymedia, self-defined as the largest, global, public, democratic media news network in existence.