This post only starts out on the nerdy side, I promise…
I was doing some research for work a while back and I ran across an old post on Cameron Olthuis’ blog about “link Nazis“. A link Nazi is essentially someone who doesn’t link out from their website for fear that those links will have a negative impact on their site’s PageRank or standing in the search engines. The impact of outbound links is a hotly debated topic in a lot of website development/search engine/SEO circles.
The debate itself is of no consequence to me. I think it’s ridiculous to fear linking out. Absolutely ridiculous. Linkage is what makes the Internet work. Links are the reason we call it the “World Wide Web“. If there is any substance to the debate it’s negligible. To the link Nazis out there: get over yourself.
I ran across a similar article today. And it got me thinking about the reason behind a fear of outward linking. Basically… it boils down to trust. By linking to another website some folks think that shows a degree of trust. If I like to you or something you’ve written I’m saying I trust you. Or so the argument goes. I don’t agree. But I’ll save that for another day.
Trust is the larger issue at play here. Where has the trust gone? And not just from one website to another. In general… from one human to the next.
Why are we so untrusting of our fellow man?
I’m guilty of a fair degree of automatic untrustworthiness. Most of us are. You will occasionally run across someone who falls on the opposite side of the spectrum - someone who trusts too much. But for the most part, we’re a bunch of untrusting, suspicious people.
Most of us don’t consciously decide to be this way. Unless we stop and think about it, most of us would probably say we weren’t. But our actions speak louder than our words.
Case in point: my sister left her purse in a shopping cart at the grocery store a few weeks back. By the time she made it back to the store to look for it, the purse was gone. We both assumed it was gone forever. We both assumed it was time to cancel the credit cards, call the bank, and get a new cell phone.
But within an hour of her return home, phone calls started flooding in from friends and family members about the purse. How did they all know it had been lost? Because the people who found it started going through her cell phone to call everyone she knew. They told everyone what the situation was in hopes that one of them would be able to contact her.
She eventually got ahold of them and they made arrangements to meet her back at the grocery store. Even though it was pouring outside… and even though she offered to come to them to get it… they insisted on meeting her halfway to make the trip shorter.
We automatically jumped to the conclusion that whoever had found her purse was going to be vacationing in Hawaii on my sister’s bill. We automatically assumed that the person with her purse had taken it for malicious purposes.
Why? ‘Cause we’ve got no trust.
Now I’m not saying that it wouldn’t have been smart for her to do all the things you do when your purse/wallet gets lost. But we just knew that the person with the purse was up to no good. And that’s different than being cautious. That’s being suspicious.
Even after the bag was returned, some of Mandy’s friends and family questioned the people’s motives. Why, some asked, didn’t they just turn the purse in? Other’s thought it was entirely brazen of them to go through her phone. They said they didn’t turn the purse in because they didn’t trust the grocery store to contact my sister (which is another sign of untrustworthiness… from a trustworthy person, no less). And without any identification other than a driver’s license - which has no phone number on it - they said they didn’t know any other way to get in contact with her.
Is it society? Are there more untrustworthy people today than there used to be? Have we all watched one too many scary news report or horror movie? Do we over-generalize one bad experience to the entire world? Do we assume that, since a few bad apples exist, the rest of the population is not to be trusted either?
I don’t know the answer. I don’t even know if an answer exists. I’m curious to know what you think. Do you consider yourself a trusting person? And if so, do your actions back that claim? If you’re not a trusting person, why?
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8 Comments
I think one thing that must be realized by bloggers is that generally speaking, the more they link out, the more others will link in. It’s anti-intuitive but it’s true. But you know the reason I link out whenever I can? Because I know how warm and fuzzy I feel when someone links to me and I like making others feel that way ;).
Once you’ve been burned by “society” (people you don’t know) multiple times, it’s hard to trust. Even once you have moments like your sister, where someone who doesn’t even know you goes out of their way to help you, the memory’s of being hurt still stand out more.
When I had that rock put through my car window, I couldn’t trust anyone. I thought everyone was out to get me, since I had been attacked at random, not by someone who even knew me. A stranger went out of their way to get me my drivers license which had been stolen from my car and they had found it on the side of the road. My trust in “people” was not restored…
@Ben: Yep. You gotta give some love to get some back. That includes link love. I think it’s especially true when you’ve been inspired by something someone else has done or something you’ve seen/heard. Even if you don’t directly reference what they’ve said it’s nice to show appreciation for inspiration. That’s why I try to start my inspired posts with a brief background on what got me thinking about whatever it is I’m sharing (it’s not just to fluff posts… I promise… haha).
@Sarah: I can totally understand where you’re coming from. And I think that mentality is where a lot of mistrust in a lot of people stems from. But if you broaden the scope beyond people, that line of thinking would mean just about everything sucks:
* There’s a few bad cars out there… so all cars suck
* There’s a few bad songs out there… so all music sucks
* There’s a few bad pizzas out there… so all pizza sucks
* Etc… etc… etc…
And we know all music and pizzas don’t suck (I’m not so sure about the cars). That’s why I’m challenging myself to get over that perception because I think the “once scorned always scorned” philosophy is behind my trust issues as well.
I try to get over that too, and I would say there are still days where I am even too trusting. I’m deffinately with you on pizza not sucking, particularly Domino’s, free Dominos, because the delivery boy told you your baby was gonna be retarted!
Haha… you’re right! That’s the best kind of pizza :P
Well, we all know that it’s alot easier to remember the bad things that happen than the good things that happen. Yeah, Sarah’s car got a rock throwin into her, and yeah, someone went out of their way to give her her drivers liscense back. And what part of that took the most effect on her? Her getting her car broken into. Negative things, like your trust being broken, are the things that stick to people the most. That is why everyone is so untrusting. Kinda like people who are screwed over in bad relationships. Why do they decide that they don’t want to be in relationships anymore? Because their trust has bee violated. It dosent matter how many good relationships they’ve been in…the bad ones stick to them the most.
It’s kind of sad if you think about it…the greatest things that could ever happen in a person’s life could easily be overtaken by something as minor as getting a $20 bill stolen out of their car because they left it unlocked. That’s really sad..
Maybe it partially comes down to which affects us more? My car getting broken into cost me a LOT of time and money, while having my drivers license returned only saved me $15 and 30 minutes. Just a thought.
I guess on the contrary however, having your trust broke in a relationship could cost you 6 months of pain/healing. The next relationship you have, if you give love another chance, could bring you 40 years of true happiness…
@KT: You’re absolutely right. I dunno how many times I had that exact conversation with patients when I worked at the hospital. It’s easier said than done, but focusing on the positive aspects of our lives would probably make us all a little happier. And if you’re talking about relationships in particular that’s even harder:
@Sarah: Good point. Maybe we’re so accustomed to looking at everything in our lives from a fiscal/time management perspective that we let that thinking spill over into our interpersonal relationships as well.
That’s a great perspective! I only wish we could train ourselves to think like that about more things. We probably wouldn’t even be having this conversation if we did think that way about more things.