Is digital a “brick” that creates trust?

Through our history and our exceptional longevity, Berger-Levrault is a company that inspires trust. The question of the evolution of the concept of trust in the digital age is logically compared with corporate culture.

Responding to our customers’ digital trust issues

It was around the concept of digital trust that the BL Institute, a campus “without a wall or teacher”, initiated its mission with the aim of keeping the company at the heart of societal challenges and sharing its prospective work with employees and with the general public.

For Berger-Levrault, digital is not only a core business.Because it is aware of the radical transformation that the technology is bringing about “in the age of the digitalization of our lives,” the Berger-Levrault teams proposed, as early as 2012, a comprehensive framework for thinking about digital trust to tackle current and future challenges. The in-house experts and consultants and our partners, meeting at the BL Institute , have highlighted the importance of the concept of digital trust as a key to understanding the issues at stake. In partnership with the École Normale Supérieure, we published a french book entitled “La confiance à l’ère du numérique”,  edited by philosophers Milad Doueihi and Jacopo Domenicucci.

How can we imagine that digital technology can generate a new relationship of trust? An analysis of the concept of trust shows that its driving force is not only technological, but also social and philosophical of which Berger-Levrault explores the avenues with the aim of working for the collective interest.

With a first question: what is digital trust?The subject is vast and there is no single answer. Spontaneously, digital rather creates an impression of mistrust.Think, for example, of voting systems: there are so many fraudulent practices with paper ballots that they are impossible to list in their entirety, and yet, electronic voting gives rise to even greater misgivings, so that the switchover to digital voting currently remains a stumbling block for most politicians and citizens. Conversely, when relying on e-reputation mechanisms, it is clear that digital has a direct impact on our trust practices.

In a company, relying on a community of thinkers to explore the theme of digital trust is an atypical method. Because they were involved in the process, around a hundred of our employees took part in the work on the right to be forgotten, the concept of surveillance, proof and security, up to the approach of blockchain, and studied its potential. With a lead.