Trust in Technology: A Distinctive and a Problematic Relation

The use of tools and artefacts is a distinctive and problematic phenomenon in the history of humanity, and as such it has been a topic of discussion since the beginning of Western culture, from the myths of the Ancient Greek, through Humanism and Romanticism to Heidegger. Several questionable aspects have been brought to the fore: the relation between technology and arts, the effects of the use of technology both on the world and on the user, and the nature of the trust that users place in technology (Mitcham 2003). This last topic is the subject of this special issue, which has the twofold goal of fostering a cross-disciplinary debate and, in doing so, of overcoming, at least in part, the fragmentation of the literature on this topic.