Can Homo Sapiens Improve upon ‘Us Versus Them’ and ‘Us Versus Nature’ During a Pandemic?

Waters, G.

Building trust is the most effective and least costly form of security available today. Often broken and volatile, the decision to trust in people, knowledge and information is a tall order during a pandemic. Optimal information security requires sustainable collaborative resource allocation and collective action in order to achieve a common objective that benefits the collective. In this chapter, I explored whether collective action was possible in a world where significant political, social, and economic differences place global families at odds and in conflict with each other. Based on the past fifteen months, it seems the optimal will be elusive for generations to come. For now, we are in survival mode. In times of stress, individual and group assumptions, knowledge, understanding, and values come into focus to help or hinder progress toward the control of our own lives during a pandemic. Using a case study analysis of more than 250 social and cultural communications within and between global families during the COVID-19 crisis;I highlight specific cross border relationships from a human centered and social experience lens. Media, reports, documents, academic publications, and observations are critically evaluated to point out the challenges and opportunities of information security in a Web 4.0 connected world. Using a collective action framework, this chapter explored the human and social aspects of trust and security in a global family during a pandemic. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.