TRAVIS: Trust And Visuality - Everyday digital practices

The ongoing crisis of trust in specific institutions (government, media, healthcare system) is often blamed for many of the social, cultural and political problems European societies are currently facing. While many researchers are exploring the relations between trust, technology and misinformation, we need to understand how trust is practiced in our everyday, ordinary lives and media practices.

Trust And Visuality: Everyday digital practices (TRAVIS) is a research project that will look at how people experience, build and express trust in news and social media images related to wellbeing and health.

We chose this focus for three reasons: First, humans experience visual information as more trustworthy than other communicative modes. Second, while trust continues to be crucial for social life, it is significantly complicated by our increasing reliance on online communication, where we have to infer our communication partners and their intentions from their on-screen representations and algorithmic manipulation. And finally, the pandemic showed us that visual digital representations related to our individual (step counts, recovery selfies) and collective (visualisations of infection rates) experiences of health are increasingly central to our lives. This makes every day, visual social media communication of health news and personal health content the perfect case study to understand trust.

Thus, TRAVIS investigates how and why people trust some visuals over others, and how content-creators and professionals create trustworthiness with and through digital visual content. Our research is undertaken in four different cultural contexts – Austria, Estonia, Finland and the UK – allowing us to combine perspectives from Nordic, Eastern-European/Post-Soviet, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic cultures, each with their own traditions and norms of trust as well as significant differences in how much institutions are trusted.

To ensure the social impact of our research findings, TRAVIS cooperates with various local initiatives. Together we will increase awareness, knowledge and skills about trustworthy, bias-free and socially responsible digital visuals, visualisation practices and the underlying mechanisms and social implications of the crisis of trust affecting Europeans’ lives.

KEYWORDS:

trust, visuality, digital technologiecs, everyday practices, digital transformation, visual culture

CONSORTIUM

  • Project Leader: Katrin Tiidenberg, Tallinn University, Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, Estonia, e-mail
  • Maria Schreiber, University of Salzburg, Department of Communication, Austria, e-mail
  • Asko Lehmuskallio, Tampere University, Visual Studies Lab, Communication Sciences Unit Finland, e-mail
  • Gillian Rose, University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment,United Kingdom, e-mail

COOPERATION PARTERS

  • Barbara Buchegger, DI M Ed., Austrian Institute for applied telecommunications / saferinternet.at initiative
  • Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, The Finnish Museum of Photography
  • Lea Larin, SIRP
  • Karmen Joller, Estonian Society of Family Doctors
  • David Wright, SWGfL, South West Grid for Learning Trust Ltd

EFFECTS & ACHIEVEMENTS

Project website

Project achievements:

What happens when doctors post on Instagram? When young adults turn to TikTok for mental health advice? When health advice is judged not only by facts, but by how something looks and feels? Across Europe, people make split-second judgments based on images they see online. But how do these visuals shape trust? Involving researchers at Tallinn University in Estonia, University of Salzburg in Austria, Tampere University in Finland and University of Oxford in the UK, TRAVIS (Trust and Visuality in Everyday Digital Practices) explored how people make sense of visual information in their daily lives and what this means for trust, especially in sensitive areas like health and wellbeing.

We asked how social media users and content creators practice visual digital trust in their socially mediated everyday life, how trust practices are shaped by platforms and their affordances and what imbues some visual digital images with trustworthiness? Relying on a variety of data and methodological innovation, we analysed user and content creator experiences, social media content and platforms. We found that trust is, to a large extent, not just information processing but accumulates from many aspects of social media use. This means that in the context of image-rich health communication on social media, trust is a matter of feelings, actual and imagined relationships with creators, presumed consensus with significant others, relations between images, how messages are communicated in terms of style and rhetoric and their fact fulness. Trust is dynamic, easy to lose and emerges across different platforms. In short, visual digital trust is relational rather than individual, dynamic rather than static, emotional rather than rational and context-sensitive in various ways. While what things look like plays a key role in trust, there aren’t really fool-proof visual cues of trustworthiness that will guaranteed that a post is trusted. And that is probably for the better, as those trust cues would inevitably be abused my manipulative actors.

TRAVIS project publishes its findings widely, in both academic and popular venues, and the research team worked with health professionals, educators, platforms and public institutions. We are grateful to our Academic Advisory Board (Anthony McCosker, Sarah Banet Weiser, Stefania Vicari, Jill Walker ReVberg) and to our Cooperation Partners (Safer Internet Austria, Finnish Museum of Photography, Estonian Society of Family Doctors, Sirp newspaper, UK Safer Internet Centre South West Grid for Learning) for helping us make sense of the complexities of trust as well as distil actionable insights from this complexity.

Publications:

  • Schaffar A., Viele Köche verderben den Brei? Qualitatives Datenmanagementanhand des Projektes TRAVIS : Ein Praxisbericht, Medienjournal, 2023
  • Lehmuskallio, A., Haara, P., The Photojournalistic Paradox: Trust in Visual Journalism, The Routledge Companion to Visual Journalism, Routledge, 2025, DOI: 10.4324/9781003391340-4, https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202510029645
  • Lehmuskallio, A., Niemelä-Nyrhinen, J., Kuvallinen Viestintä Osana Sosiaalista Vuorovaikutusta, Lääketieteellinen Aikakauskirja Duodecim, vol. 140, 2025, https://www.duodecimlehti.fi/duo18571
  • Tiidenberg, K., Lehmuskallio, A., Rose, G., Davidjants, J., Hamper, J., Niemelä-Nyrhinen, J., Learning from the Mess: Social Media Elicitation Interviews, Qualitative Inquiry, SAGE, 2025, DOI: 10.1177/1077800425134674
  • Tiidenberg, K., Schreiber, M., Schaffař, A., Markham, A. N., Patterns of Surprise and Ambivalence: Studying Social Media Visuality, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, vol. 26(2), 2025, https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-26.2.4182
  • Schreiber, M., Liedtke, M., “Im Internet kann sich jeder Doktor nennen”: Vertrauenspraktiken im Umgang mit visuellen Darstellungen medizinischer Expertise, Visual Literacy: Bildkompetenzen in den digitalen Medien, 2025, https://www.halem-verlag.de/produkt/visual-literacy/
  • Tiidenberg, K., Davidjants, J., Schaffař, A., Hamper, J., Kortesoja, M., Niemelä-Nyrhinen, J., Consumptive Curation for Self-Care: In Search of Dumber Algorithms, Information, Communication and Society, Taylor & Francis, 2025
  • Tiidenberg, K., Schreiber, M., Lehmuskallio, A., Visual Trust, The Research Handbook on Visual Communication, Edward Elgar, 2025
  • Lehmuskallio, A., Favero, P. S. H., Visual Studies: A Social Scientific Perspective, Routledge, 2025, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003084549
  • Niemelä-Nyrhinen, J., Närhinen, T., Leisti, T., Constructing Knowledge within the Photographic Apparatus, Photographies, Taylor and Francis, vol. 18, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2025.2486375
  • Niemelä-Nyrhinen, J., Uusitalo, N., Redistributing the Sensible: Exploring Aesthetic Practices in a Photography Course, Environmental Education Research, Taylor and Francis, vol. 31, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2024.2403454
  • Davidjants J., Hamper J., Niemelä-Nyrhinen J., What does healthy look like? Social hallucinations of embodied health, 2025
  • Lehmuskallio A., Rose G., Screenimages as environmental media, Sage, 2025
  • Tiidenberg K., Davidjants J., Hamper J., Niemelä-Nyrhinen J., Albury K., Geographies of sexual health on social media, Health & Place, Elsevier, 2024
  • Tiidenberg K., Davidjants J., Hamper J., Niemelä-Nyrhinen J., Pain, puns and post-feminism: sexual health on image-rich social media, 2025
  • Tiidenberg K., Schreiber M., Lehmuskallio A., Rose G., Davidjants J., Schaffař A., Hamper J., Gombe P., Liedtke M., Schmid T., Kortesoja M., Niemelä-Nyrhinen J., “The path went like that”: distributed seeing and the digital mediation of visual trust, 2025
  • Tiidenberg K., Schreiber M., Liedtke M., “Let me be sad for a moment” – Young adults mental-health-related social media practices and trust heuristics, European Journal of Cultural Studies, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), 2025
  • Tiidenberg K., Kneas D., Social Media Authenticity, Polity Press, 2026
  • Tiidenberg K., Schreiber M., Lehmuskallio A., Same, same, but different: making sense of changes in social media visuality, in: The Routledge Companion to Visual Studies, Routledge, 2025
  • Liedtke M., Networked videos as synthetic situations: Researching YouTube-based controversies with Situational Analysis, in: Conceptualising Critical Visual Research for Social Media, Palgrave, 2026
  • Schreiber M., Contextualizing visual data and visual practices, in: Conceptualising Critical Visual Research for Social Media, Palgrave, 2026
  • Tiidenberg K., Markham A. N., Moodboarding as method, in: Conceptualising Critical Visual Research for Social Media, Palgrave, 2026
  • Tiidenberg K., Sitting with a post – analyzing social media meaning making multimodally and intertextually, in: Conceptualising Critical Visual Research for Social Media, Palgrave, 2026
  • Davidjants J., Davidjants B., A Sound-Focused Multimodal Analysis of Russian Ukraine-War Propaganda on TikTok, in: Conceptualising Critical Visual Research for Social Media, Palgrave, 2026
  • Lehmuskallio A., Kortesoja M., Niemelä-Nyrhinen J., Visual trust with social media: Medical doctors’ institutional, interpersonal, and embodied forms of visual communication, in: Visual Studies, Taylor & Francis, 2025
  • Lehmuskallio A., Davidjants J., Hamper J., Liedtke M., Kortesoja M., Templates of Trust, Social Media + Society, 2025
  • Tiidenberg K., Schreiber M., Lehmuskallio A., Visual Trust, in: The Research Handbook on Visual Communication, Edward Elgar, 2025
  • Tiidenberg K., Visual Social Media, in: Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture – Digitisations, Transformations, and Futures, Bloomsbury, 2024
  • Schreiber M., Visual Digital Traces of Life, in: Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture – Digitisations, Transformations, and Futures, Bloomsbury, 2024
  • Hamper J., Crane J., Fannin M., Calkin S., Fleetwood-Smith R., Fraser J., Freeman C., Perler L., Schurr C., Shipman E., Lively and Unstable Implosions: (Re)productive Objects as Experiments in Ad-Hoc Archives, GeoHumanities, Taylor & Francis, 2026
  • Schreiber M., „Das erste was man sieht sind diese muskulösen Körper” – Mediensozialisation und algorithmisierte Körperbilder auf Social Media, in: Mediensozialisation in „smarten“ Umgebungen, Springer, 2026
  • Tiidenberg K., Schreiber M., Lehmuskallio A., Rose G., Davidjants J., Schaffař A., Hamper J., Gombe P., Liedtke M., Schmid T., Kortesoja M., Niemelä-Nyrhinen J., You won’t know it when you see it: the opacity of trust on social media, Visual Communication, 2025

 Start date

1 November 2022

Project duration

36 months

 Project budget

€ 1 334 497

Funding organisations