Computer-mediated hospitality networks in Siberia: investigating reciprocity, trust and social connectivity along the TransSiberian Railroad and beyond
Computer-mediated hospitality networks are the Internet-based platforms that allow people to host each other for free in their private homes. The relationship is first established in the virtual environment and directly translates into a relationship offline. But before “meeting” offline hosts and guests are in most cases total strangers to each other. In the last couple of years such networks have grown in popularity around the world, particularly among youth, thus shaping totally new forms of hospitality and travel culture. The global membership of CouchSurfing.org – the most popular hospitality network in the world - has gone up from 250.000 in 2007 to 1.6 million in 2009 (Zuev, 2008a). In Russia this specific network currently counts approximately 10.000 members, among which 6 thousand reside in Moscow and St.Petersburg, and around one thousand members in Siberia regularly hosting “couch-surfers” in their homes or using this network to travel within the country or abroad. The number is likely to grow thus generating new ways in which spatial practices unfold within tourism and other fields of spatial mobility.
Existing Western perspectives (Bialski and Batorski 2009, Molz, 2007) view the phenomenon of hospitality networks in terms of cosmopolitanism and intimacy values, excluding the possibility of variety of social meanings of the practice to different groups with different sociocultural backgrounds and in different sociogeographical contexts. So far the role of the visual side of users’ profiles in establishing trust between the users has been largely ignored. Visual cues are crucial in establishing trust online and understanding the additional utilites which the network has for youth. Methodologically this study stands out as it integrates the analysis of both verbal and visual sides in the profiles of the hospitality network participants. The study adopts sociospatial theoretical perspective (Lefebvre, 1991, Teo&Leong 2006, Zuev, 2006, 2008, 2009) which views CouchSurfing as a spatial practice with different underlying values and varying degree of emotional charge for participants. The adopted approach builds on already existent studies of couchsurfing as a spatial phenomenon (Pultar and Raubal, 2009) and helps to delineate the changing pattern of individual youth tourism from commercially mediated forms (such as backpacking) to institutionalized networks facilitated by the Internet.
The goal of the study is to explore the social and moral implications of the phenomenon of hospitality networks and use it as an entry to investigate forms of reciprocity, trust and social connectivity in contemporary society. It will analyze how computer-mediated hospitality networks such as CouchSurfing (CS) not only generate a specific ideology of host-guest relationship mediated by the Internet, but also provoke the fragmentation of spatial mobility and travel patterns among the traveling subjects.
The study will pursue to fulfill three major tasks. The first one is to explore the ideological underpinning of computer-mediated travel and hospitality, especially the conception of free hospitality claimed by the CS community, which seems to contest dominant values of reciprocity underlying the market economy. The second task is to understand how trust is established in the context of online communities. In the society marked by the maxim that you cannot trust anyone, it is appropriate for the study to question the modalities and processes to generate trust in the context of computer-mediated communication. The third task is to study the modalities of the actual CouchSurfing practice in the offline context, at the level both of contact between hosts and guests and of the internal dynamics of geographic appropriation, spatial trajectories and value systems generated and mediated by CS.
To achieve the research objective and fulfill the related tasks, the research will focus on CouchSurfing hospitality network in Siberia and will produce two datasets, using respectively relevant methods. The first dataset will be generated through the visual and verbal analysis of the profiles of CS members, thus using the website as a data archive. The use of content-analysis software will allow a quantitative analysis of these profiles and will produce general characteristics of the studied community. It will help to identify the social structure of the CS community in Siberia, recurrent themes and images being used and test correlations between different types of content. The second dataset will be generated through photo-elicitation interviews with a sample of couchsurfers at several locations in Siberia and Far East (Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Yakutsk). Interviews will focus on recurrent themes which emerged during the content analysis, with the aim to understand what people mean by using certain wordings, images, or rhetoric on their individual profiles. Besides, some of the the interviewees upon their consent will be followed by the researcher To guarantee variations the technique of statistically nonrepresentative stratified sampling proposed by Trost (1986) is used. The technique is different from the snowball and constant comparison techniques and allows to better understand dynamics and the variety of relationships, rather than to make estimates or prevalences. The key procedures in the sampling include making the list of the independent variables relevant to the study and their dichotomization. The selected variables are further organized in a table which works as a guide in sampling.
Justification of Research Site.
‘Siberia’, as a historically formed social and imaginary entity, supplies a valuable social and geographical context for this study. Siberia in general has never been a mass-tourist destination. For various reasons — industrialization, closed city status, peripheral position, limited access to resources and infrastructure which extend mobility (consulates, transport hubs, cultural centers) many Siberian cities had not seen so much commercialized tourist traffic or intercultural contact as their European counterparts. With the emergence of CouchSurfing the locations clustered along TransSiberian railroad have become the major nodes of attracting travelers from around the world. Despite its distinctive seasonal peak (from May to September), CouchSurfing practice has become the promotion vehicle for intercultural contact between the highly mobile foreign guests and less mobile Siberian hosts. In this context, historically formed norms of hospitality and conceptions of trust – differentiated according to class and other social criteria – are confronted to often contradictory conceptions of hospitality. The existence of subethnic identity Sibiryak generated popular claims of Siberian hospitality being distinctively more authentic than the European Russian hospitality, more universal, less commercialized (typical of Moscow or St.Petersburg), more inclusive and better preserved. At the same time the increased migration of labor migrants into Siberia, primarily from NIS states, China and Vietnam creates an antagonistic image of Siberia - periphery to the European Russia, but a core and welfare-source for the citizens of the «Far» and «Near» Abroad. Siberia faces a problem of the social hierarchy of guests, a dilemma - what kinds of guests to consider as more deserving of the hospitality and trust and what kinds of guests as less. The ultimate question is: Does the use of CouchSurfing in Siberian context reproduce cosmopolitanism and communist internationalist values or cosmopolitanism for some guests goes well with the exclusion of other guests? Specific research questions concerning the Siberian community of the couchsurfers can be clustered around the issue of spatial trajectories of young people. Do young people travel more with the emergence of the CS network? Do they still feel the “core-periphery” divide in the digital era? Do they travel intensively (more at one place) or extensively (more places)? Do they travel more within their own country or abroad? Is practicing CouchSurfing physically and emotionally draining or charging?
Another practical aspect supporting Siberia as a research focus lies in the accessibility of data; the researcher lived in Krasnoyarsk, was the first CouchSurfer in Krasnoyarsk, has observed development of CouchSurfing in Russia since 2006 through direct engagement as both host and guest in different locations in Russia.
The project outcomes are expected to be published in the Journal of computer-mediated communication, New Media&Society and Annals of Tourism Research.
References
Bialski, P. and P. Batorski (2009) "Familiar Strangers: Trust and social navigation in a community which functions online and offline". In: J. Ang and P. Zaphiris (Hrsg.): Social Computing and Virtual Communities. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press Chapman & Hall.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Molz, J.G. (2007) "Cosmopolitans on the Couch: Mobile hospitality and the internet". In: J.G. Molz and S. Gibson (ed.): Mobilizing Hospitality: The ethics of social relations in a mobile world. Ashgate.
Pultar, E. and M. Raubal (2009) "Progressive Tourism: Integrating social, transportation and data networks". In: Nalin Sharda (ed.): Tourism informatics: Visual travel recommender systems, social communities, and user interface design. No place: Idea Group Reference.
Teo, P. and S. Leong (2006) "A Postcolonial Analysis of Backpacking". Annals of Tourism Research 33: 109-131.
Trost, J.E. "Statistically nonrepresentative stratified sampling: A sampling technique for qualitative studies". Qualitative Sociology 9(1): 54-56.
Zuev, D. (2006) "Reconstructing the Meanings of Traveling among Young People in Modern Russia: The use of the photo interview". European Spatial Research and Policy 13(1), 113-132.
Zuev, D. (2008a) "Cross-Cultural Comparison of Visual Self-Presentations and Use of Visuals in a Social Networking Site: The case of www.couchsurfing.com". Paper presented at the 1st ISA Forum of Sociology, Barcelona, 5-8 September 2008.
Zuev, D. (2008b) "The Practice of Free-Traveling: Young people coping with access in postsoviet Russia". Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research 16(1): 5-26.
Zuev, D. (2009) "Computer Mediated Traveling: Negotiating geographic space by means of CouchSurfing". In: D. Picard (Hrsg.): Emotion in Motion: The passions of tourism, travel and movement (conference proceedings). Leeds: CTCC/Leeds Met University.