These considerations lead to the hypothesis that the printing press has completely changed our modes of coping with the unfamiliar. The distinction of familiar and unfamiliar becomes blurred; the religious technique of reintroducing the unfamiliar into the familiar through symbolization loses its former potence. There is no longer any need to distinguish symbolon and didbolon, good and bad forces, at a cosmological level. These schemes are replaced by the question of whether knowledge and power are used in a positive or a negative way, given particular interests. Thus confidence and eventually trust are the decisive issues, and familiarity survives as a purely private milieu® without function for society as a whole.

XREF: Relates to McLuhan's media theory and Ong's work on orality and literacy, both of which connect communication technology to cognitive and social change.

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 1415