Trusting on the soft Global platform– a Functional Imperative

Abstract

From ancient times, when simplicity prevailed at isolated civilisations, to date, when the world has become a
global village, social complexities have correspondingly increased, in sympathy of size. As interspersed
people are no longer in physical contact, Quality of their social interactions is also impacted. Should one
continue to trust others as in past, vis-à-vis this enlarged social platform {which euphorically uses internet
technologies in a world-wide networking by wire}, is a big imperative haunting the intelligentsia today.This
is an evaluative study of ‘trust’ posed by 54 respondents in the soft global networks within world wide web
(w.w.w). The survey instrument was a questionnaire designed in excel sheet, and circulated by stratified emails,
chosen from 5 networks of different kinds and dimensions, further allowing dispersal by snowball
sampling. The design of questionnaire was based upon Taguchi’s Design of Experiments, on three factors, at
3 to 5 levels, for which responses were sought at 5 levels. The results depicted a mixed people perspective on
trust factor averaging 2.48 on a likert scale of 1 to 5.
Keywords: Taguchi Design of Experiments, Orkut, Facebook and yahoogroups, Mahabharata, Gita,
Karma, Networking, Life Cycle