Multi-spatiality of Social Media Platforms: The Enactment of Trust in Fluid Space

Abstract

This research explores how a firm engenders trust in and initiates relations with entities or actors lying in autonomous online communities or personal networks of its employees, but beyond the firm’s boundaries. It problematizes the boundaries of online communities and personal networks on a social media platform, and explores the engendering of trust in an Indian e-commerce firm by foreign designers who were initially reluctant to partner with it, through specific enactments of trust by diverse actors on the platform. By using the conceptual categories of network space and fluid space developed in Science and Technology Studies, this research shows that social media platforms provide integrated social contexts where spatial objects, like online communities and personal networks, occupy both network and fluid space, and hence exhibit multi-spatiality. Additionally, the transient fluidity of these objects is found to enable the enactment of trust and its subsequent import across the object’s boundaries.