I met a
depressed but burned event in 2008. At that time, I loved a South Korea group named
TVXQ for several years and they were announced to release their 4th
album at that year. Almost every fan club in China started to become the agency
to sell Korean original albums to Chinese fans in that period of time. I chose
a newly formed fan club(X fan club) to buy the Korean original album’s A
version and B version through Internet. But half a year later, I didn’t receive
remaining B version of the album yet. I connected with the webmaster several
times and got the same answer that she would ask the person(C) who undertook to
buy albums from South Korea. I didn’t believe I was been cheated until I found
a post for discussion about C’s cheating records by fans from different fan
clubs in a forum. Even though several person were been cheated, it’s hard to
punish her in a legal way because we came from various places of China and the
total money cannot be placed a case on file. It was such a huge shock for my
heart that I went back to scan my blindness trust in the fan network.
Hurley (2006)
defines trust as confident reliance on someone when you are in a position of
vulnerability. As a student with less social experience and interest
relationship in the past, I always tended to trust everyone. Thompson (2009)
mentions that we like people whom we perceive to be similar to us because of
similarity-attraction effect. As a fan of TVXQ, I often communicated with other
fans from different backgrounds through the Internet on the basis of same
faith. According to the similar favor, I trust all the fans with no difference.
Therefore, when I found a way to purchase my albums from a fan club, the only
thing I considered was to select one with smaller number in its name list so
that I didn’t have to wait for a long time rather than the one with higher
reputation but have so many people in front of me. But the truth is the more
popular and bigger influence a fan club, the less probability of its moral
issues. Hurley (2006) also describes that when people choose to trust, they
have gone through a decision-making process and provides a model for trust with
3 decision-maker factors and 7 situational factors. As a risk avoider, I chose
fan club since I give them more trust than mere business men in terms of
identification-based trust (Thompson, 2009). And in the situation between I and
X fan club, I thought we had common value (TVXQ) and aligned interest (enjoy
TVXQ’s new songs and support their singing). What’s more, it became more
reliable in my mind that there needed relatively strong interpersonal and
financial capability to build and maintain a fan club through Internet. In
fact, X fan club and C were just cooperative relationship. C is a business
woman who cooperated with different fan clubs, she used to using all kinds of
excuses to delay deliver goods or even disappearing after only sending small
parts of goods. When we found she was a cheater, we couldn’t transfer debts to
fan clubs because they remove the responsibility to C with the plea that our
money was send to C’s personal account without the participation of fan clubs.
After that
event, I realized that the trust cannot be given to each person especially in a
virtual world. Building trust needs a deep though and consideration rationally and
deliberately (Thompson, 2009).
References
Hurley, R.
(2006). The Decision to Trust. Harvard
Business Review, 84(9), 56-58
Thompson, L.
(2009). The Mind and Heart of the
Negotiator. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall.
