Technologies of hospitality: How planned encounters develop between strangers

Abstract

New technologies in use today like CouchSurfing.com are allowing people to create planned encounters, en masse, between other strangers. These 'technologies of hospitality' are producing new rules of engagement, and new relationships that blur the boundaries between friend, acquaintance, stranger and enemy -boundaries that are yet to be defined. This article will show that while mobility inevitably causes strangers to collide and interact, certain technologies of hospitality in use today create conditions for strangers to meet one another and engage in acts of hospitality -moments of intimacy, closeness or mutual understanding. This article outlines the process by which two strangers become close using one such technology: CouchSurfing.org. While such encounters foster trust, mutual learning and 'personal growth', closeness is not always altruistic and technologies of hospitality also allow people involved to exert their status and power during interaction, creating moments of tension, awkwardness or distrust. Using multi-method ethnography, this article provides an in-depth account of these technologies of hospitality, focusing on the relationships being created as well as the problems that arise for the way in which we define friendship and closeness today.

Fair Is Good, but What Is Fair? Negotiations of Distributive Justice in an Emerging Nonmonetary Sharing Model

“…Our analysis of how divergent constructions of fairness can emerge within a concrete nonmonetary sharing system can contribute to understanding struggles in cognate sharing systems in which the absence of explicit reciprocal rules leaves the circulation of resources a nebulous activity. Unclear situations of fairness similar to the present context can, for example, be found in other nonmonetary models of the Sharing Economy, such as booksharing (Corciolani and Dalli 2014), the peer-to-peer hospitality platform CouchSurfing (Bialski 2012;Hellwig et al 2014), or Skoros, a "for-free-shop" in Greece (Skoros 2015). For example, Skoros encountered similar struggles within its community regarding distributive norms and underlying justice principles.…”

Account sharing in the context of networked hospitality exchange

“…Notions of reciprocity and trust [6,9] have attracted scholarly attention, as trust has been deemed crucial for letting a stranger sleep in one's home or for staying on someone else's couch. Recent studies [1,3,14] have considered how people negotiate access to personalized spaces and adopt roles that help achieve comfortable interactions.…”

Authenticity and the Sharing Economy

“…As outlined above, while sharing an apartment with a stranger through Airbnb may be associated with economic (saving money), social (meeting new people), and hedonic (enjoying the novelty of an experience) benefits, there may also be risks and detrimental experiential aspects tied to it. The sharing setting creates instances of closeness that are usually only experienced in a closed circle of friends and family (Bialski, 2012a;2012b;Buchberger, 2012;Lampinen, 2016a;2016b;Zuev, 2012). For Airbnb and other hospitality facilitators, it is therefore necessary to normalize the meeting of strangers as a desirable, or at least acceptable, scenario (German Molz, 2014;Lampinen, 2014;Richardson, 2015).…”