In the current era of digitalization, trust has emerged as a crucial factor in socialisation through digital media. However, due to the uncertain nature of individual identities in the digital realm, it poses a challenge to translate social trust in virtual identities into social trust in real identities, particularly for social activities that necessitate a blend of online and offline integration. The outbreak of catastrophic public health crises such as COVID-19 in recent years has had a profound impact on people's social trust in the physical world. By scrutinising the attributes of social trust, this study advocates three distinct categories of trust: indirect trust, direct trust, and quantitative trust. This paper establishes a comprehensive social trust mechanism that blends virtual and physical reality to facilitate user socialisation in the digital media context. Subsequently, by conducting user interviews and questionnaires, this study probes sports socialisation as a research subject, that integrates online and offline social needs, and combines the distinctive characteristics of sports social behaviour in the digital media context with the generic trust mechanism. A trust mechanism for sports socialisation is proposed that is applicable to the fusion of virtuality and reality in the epidemic environment. The theoretical model of the social trust mechanism is applied to the development of a mobile application to test its rationality. The social trust mechanism and practical experience proposed in this study can provide valuable insights for the establishment of user social trust in the digital media context, where virtual and real realities intersect.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)