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Re: [ox-en] CouchSurfing, and the Center for Adventure Economics



2007/2/11, Michael Bauwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>:

I'm extremely impressed by your community's work, I
think that extended to the concept of 'free life'

Here's an interesting interpretation about hospitality exchange systems...

Emotional Tourism
From HospitalityGuide.net

An interpretive study of online hospitality exchange systems as a new
form of tourism

By Paula Bialski
June, 2006

The way people move, the way we shift space, the way we push and
explore the boundaries between "us," the tourists and "them," the
native citizens, has become a fascinating and quickly changing
phenomenon. Take the example of Grzesiek, a Pole living in Utrecht,
Holland, traveling to Geneva, Switzerland. Rejecting the classic route
of hotel or hostel accommodation, Grzegorz joined the rapidly-growing
phenomenon of what is known as "hospitality service" and "slept" on
Frank's, the Genevan's, couch. I put "slept" in quotation marks
because instead of sleeping, Grzegorz spent the entire night listening
to Frank's life story. Grzegorz didn't experience a strictly material,
sensory view of Geneva. His experience was not limited to the sights
of a museum, or the smells and tastes of a Swiss restaurant. In
staying at his host, Frank's, apartment, Grzegorz became a new form of
tourist, where emotion and closeness to another human being was
transferred into the practice of tourism. Within two days, he
experienced an interpersonal connection that went further than just a
relationship to sights and smells of the city. In being hosted by
Frank, he was guaranteed another sensory experience beyond material
values.

Grzesiek is only one in many cases verifying the fact that tourism
today is experiencing a great fragmentation, and moreover, is starting
to take on new meaning and purpose for each individual traveler. This
fragmentation and change within the discipline is not something new.
The purpose of travel has been changing since its origin. Yet before I
move on, I want to emphasize that new processes within the practice of
tourism do not replace each other in time, but merely become new
sub-practices within the grand scheme of tourism itself. Motivations
to tour, to shift space, are growing and constantly being reinvented
which, one can argue, is a direct result of modernity. To emphasize my
point, George Simmel and Anthony Giddens both observe that one of the
conditions of modern social life is interaction with others who are
strangers to them. The need for interaction with strangers also
encompasses the sphere of tourism, and becomes a motivation to tour,
as I have mentioned earlier. But this interaction with strangers was
not a primary motivation of tourism prior to modernity. So, we can see
here that the motivations of tourists become fragmented, causing
division within the whole discipline of tourism itself.

But let's get back to the basics. Originally, tourism began as a form
of exploration, colonization, and then simply an upper-class
privilege, where individuals abandoned their home in order to
experience another setting. The original version of tourism had one
single purpose – to experience, first-hand, a new setting. The new
"experience" was an all-sensory experience – involving new sights,
sounds, smells, and tastes. These sensory experiences were locked up
in material "touchables" such as a hotel room, a local dish, or a busy
street. Photography itself became a way in which these "touchables"
could be documented and brought back home.

Post-tourism can be called the first fragmentation. Mike Featherstone,
John Urry and other sociologists researching the discipline of the
"new tourism" placed an emphasis on the mechanisms of globalization –
where an individual, now middle to-upper class -- travels in order to
experience the real, the local. Where classical tourism was about
going to one area and seeing things, Featherstone explains that
post-tourists "seek a whole range of experiences and direct encounters
with locals." In order to explain this phenomenon, theorists heavily
borrowed Erving Goffman's metaphor of stage/curtain or private versus
public space, where the tourist yearned to not only experience the
public sphere of drinking the coffee from a café, but also longed to
observe the private sphere of how that coffee was harvested and
served.

Post-tourism and the emphasis of the local has now formed a new hybrid
of tourism, and yet another fragmentation within the tourism process.
This new hybrid is inextricably complex and is something I have termed
"Emotional Tourism," where the travel experiences are not strictly
limited to sensory "touchables" (such as the hotel room I mentioned in
the previous paragraph), but provide various emotions linked to the
closeness achieved with another human being. Where post-tourism was
the tourism linked to experiencing processes and private-sphere events
(such as the daily life of a villager in the Swiss alps), Emotional
Tourism is now the experience of human-to-human emotion. An easy way
to explain this is to go back to my example of the tourist photograph.
In the first two stages of tourism, the tourist could capture his/her
experience through a picture ("This is the food we ate at the
restaurant in Geneva," or "This is me at the villager's cabin in the
alps"). Yet the Emotional Tourist's experience cannot be captured on
film. Grzegorz could have taken a picture of Frank, his host, but the
photo would mean nothing without the emotions linked to his
experience. The origins of emotional tourism are deeply rooted within
the processes of globalization, Internet discourse, new social
stratification, the western individualist society and post-modernity.
I admit that all these processes are hard to digest at once. Yet in
the following essay, I seek to break them down in order to develop a
new interpretation of tourism as a new, emotional phenomenon. The
hospitality network Grzesiek used is a direct result of Emotional
Tourism, and deconstructing the main processes of this new type of
home-stay exchange will hopefully help us grasp the complexity of
Emotional Tourism itself.

Let's digress for a minute to explain what hospitality networks like
CouchSurfing.com exactly are. The first hospitality network, called
Servas Open Doors, was established by Bob Luitweiler in 1949 as a
cross national, non-profit, volunteer run organization advocating
interracial and international peace. While Servas had only a few
hundred members worldwide, the Internet in the 1990s paved way for a
number of other hospitality exchange services. Today, some of the
services number over 140,000 members.

The main example I will use is one of the largest systems called
Couchsurfing.com, with 70,000 members globally. Its main purpose is
establishing a global network of users who wish to travel to foreign
places while residing with other members of the network. Couchsurfing,
like other hospitality exchange systems, functions on a system of
reciprocity. I chose Couchsurfing.com, due to the fact that in my
opinion, the website itself is the most advanced and user-friendly of
all the hospitality exchange systems, especially when talking about
the visual dynamics on the site. Each new user forms a profile of
themselves – a calling card of sorts that establishes the "self" to
other users in the system. Most users add pictures, hobbies, and links
to other friends within the system to their profile. Once one's
profile has been established, a user can search other "couches"
located in the destination he/she is traveling to (ex. Geneva). This
member then emails the member in Geneva, requesting to "surf" their
"couch." By "surfing" a couch, bed, tent, etc., the individual actor
often builds some sort of bond with their hosts. An emotional (either
positive, negative, or neutral) link is often formed because the
tourist or "surfer" enters the private sphere of the host. Moreover,
social ties are maintained both on and off line.

In order to dissect the way hospitality services function, I could
easily use a long list of social theory, including James Coleman's
social capital theory or Manuel Castell's social network theory (as an
example), yet it is not my the purpose of this essay to delve deeper
into the forms of reciprocity involved in hospitality services. I
could dive into ardent discourse regarding the McDonalization of
tourism, or the standardization of place, but I'm not going to do that
here. The problems I have just listed represent the problems
surrounding the sociology of tourism today. While this dialogue is
important, I believe that not enough discussion has been constructed
surrounding the motivations pushing people to travel from one place to
another. Today, these motivations are directly stimulated by the
forces of post-modernity, and involve the need to be close to another
human being, and the need to re-establish the concept of "self" to
another foreign person. These phenomenons within Emotional Tourism can
be split into two phases: relationship tourism, and tourism of
constructing the "self."

As Kenneth Gergen puts it, emotions can be viewed as constitutive
features not of individuals but of relationships. But today, the
process of establishing a close emotional relationship with another
human being is experiencing a modern crisis. Gergen derives examples
from Durkheim as he writes: "with the increasing complexity of the
modern state, 'organic solidarity' has given way to 'mechanic'
relations." Highly individualistic "me-first" societies of the west
have greatly increased the displacement of each individual from the
rest of their surroundings. The emotional disconnectedness individuals
feel towards one another on a day-to-day basis starts from childhood.
Francis Fukuyama reminds us that much of the classical social theory
written at the turn of the nineteenth century assumes that as
societies modernize, the family diminishes in importance and is
replaced by more impersonal kinds of social ties. The hollowness of
impersonal social ties has led the individual to search for more
substantial relationships. And since the bond of family has become
weak, broken, or never fully established, the individual shall search
elsewhere – to other spaces and places that will provide him/her with
the experience of closeness.

Frank, Grzegorz's host in Geneva, was not unlike many of the other
Couchsurfers I have come into contact with during my research: a white
male in his early 30s, well educated, and clearly experiencing a sort
of existential crisis. Grzegorz described him as being deeply in need
of human contact, someone to listen to his stories, someone to be
there as verbal and moral support. Frankly, Frank sounds a bit like
someone in dire need of a good therapy session. But, Grzegorz was keen
to reciprocate the emotional support, despite the fact that he had
just hours before met Frank face-to-face. Why this sudden need to open
up to a complete stranger? And why is Grzegorz so keen on experiencing
Frank's raw emotions?

Giddens writes that we live in a peopled world, not merely one of
anonymous, blank faces, and the interpolation of abstract systems
(faith in symbolic tokens or expert systems and institutions) into our
activities is intrinsic to bringing this about. Essentially, an
individual must find her or his identity amit the strategies and
options provided by abstract systems. So, an abstract system, as
Giddens calls it, can be a multitude of processes involved the entire
system of tourism – processes like flying a plane, taking a tour of a
city, making use of a local museum, and the process of Couchsurfing or
any other form of hospitality exchange. Most importantly, to use
Giddens' theory, these abstract systems (here Couchsurfing) bring a
rise of personal trust relationships, and these relationships demand
for "opening oneself up" to the other, to hide nothing from the other.
What we are experiencing here is not only the individual's desire to
experience the private space, the "home", but a need to experience
another human. The Couchsurfing mechanism provides users with the
immediate emotional exchange they are yearning for. On the other hand,
as the tourist, Grzegorz didn't exactly need to experience human
emotion, but by becoming Frank's guest, he was instantly thrown into
an engaging relationship whether he wanted to or not. In turn, his
experience in Geneva was marked by Frank's personality. Now when he
looks back at his trip to Geneva, his experience with Frank becomes
most memorable. Moreover, this is not to say that those Couchsurfers
who "surf" go into the experience blindly. They too, often choose this
means of travel because they want to experience an "interesting"
person. I'd also like to underline that I'm not implying that Frank
and Grzegorz became best friends. What I am trying to show is the way
the experience of human emotion takes precedence over the experience
of material "touchables" classically tied to a tourist. If we assume
that hospitality exchange communites exist with a level of emotional
exchange, it would be worthwhile to bring Michel Maffesoli and his
idea of "Neo-tribalism" into this discussion. In his argument,
Maffesoli rejects the idea of an individualized society, and argues
that the modern global world is segregated into "neo-tribes," to which
individuals become members in order to exchange the same emotions.
When Couchsurfers travel and exchange thoughts and feelings, they
seldom come into conflict. Emotional exchange is an exchange of
empathy, understanding, and agreement. Instead of a "rationalized
social" environment, in which we see the world as a rational
individual, we are witnessing an empathetic "sociality" expressed by a
succession of ambiences, feelings, and emotions. Without getting too
abstract, the point I wish to make here is that the emotion
Couchsurfers wish to experience is usually an emotion of understanding
and insight, but seldom conflict. Dialogue between "surfer" and "host"
often involves social commentary or personal narrative which is almost
always greeted with approval. On one hand, Grzegorz's support (and not
rejection or critisism) to Frank's emotional queries can be simple
decency as a guest in someone's home. Yet, it can't go unstated that
Couchsurfing is a sort of neo-tribe which trives on empathetic
exchange.

Now that I've defined the process of relationship tourism, let's
return to Frank as a person. His "desperate need to talk about
himself" as Grzegorz put it, is not all-encompassing within
hospitality exchange. But it does happen quite often. Each individual
I have encountered has shown elements of "establishing the self," in
which he/she spends time to explain who he or she is to the other
person. According to Grzegorz, Frank stayed up until 7 in the morning
talking about his life, and was less interested in what Grzegorz had
to say. Establishing the "self" while Couchsurfing is done in two
ways: for one, we present a live profile of ourselves presenting our
interests, our skills, and our likes and dislikes. This profile
resembles our online Couchsurfing profile (for example: "I speak 4
languages and I love the Beatles). The second way of establishing the
self is by telling stories. Note how Kenneth Gergen addresses his
analysis of self-narration: "…saying that we use stories to make
ourselves comprehensible does not go far enough. Not only do we tell
our lives as stories; there is also a significant sense in which our
relationships with each other are lived out in narrative form." Almost
the entire relational experience Grzegorz was constructed through
Frank's self-narration. He told stories of his years as a TV reporter,
his travel experiences, his tales of love. Each piece in this
narrative was used to "paint a picture" of Frank as a whole person.
One can presume that creating such a narrative was as helpful for
Grzegorz (to understand Frank as a person) as it was to Frank (to
assert who he is and what exactly he accomplished in life). The
fluidity of modernity leaves the individual without an exact
definition of self. Specifically, we are not set in stone. Therefore,
the more monologue and dialogue we have concerning ourselves help us
assert ourselves, helps verify who we are as people. Giddens would
blame it all on the reflexivity of modernity, explaining that the
construction of the self is a reflexive project. This narrative and
presentation of our profile is part of our reflexive project, and is
now instantly available through contact with another human in
hospitality exchange networks – tourism has just taken on a whole
other level.

Yet as we dissect the pieces within Emotional Tourism, one question
remains: "Why must individuals shift space in order to experience
human-to-human contact and 'real emotion'? Why can't we just stay
experience this at home?" Ostensibly, establishing relationships and
experiencing intense person-to-person contact is much easier outside
one's immediate realm. Moreover, the idea of meeting another human
outside of one's own cultural context, and forming some kind of bond
with them, becomes an exotic and foreign experience when compared with
the backdrop of the individual's home setting. We must also take into
account that one consequence of modernity is that it "dis-places" us,
and place becomes ambivalent, phantasmagoric as Giddens eloquently
puts it. Therefore, the fact that we are experiencing a new emotional
relationship in another country or city is really secondary to the
fact that new global mechanisms such as Couchsurfing and hospitality
exchange allow us to form relationships while traveling outside our
normal setting.

Let me restate my claim. Firstly, the modern "self" longs for union
with another. Secondly, our fluid modernity forces us to the constant
re-telling of our self-narrative. Couchsurfing and other hospitality
exchange systems fulfill these needs. Couchsurfing embodies the global
nature of our time – and creates the Emotional Tourism mechanism.

Frank and Grzegorz do not visit each other. They don't exchange
emails. Some may say their two-day emotional exchange was a
no-strings-attatched affair. But perhaps, Grzegorz will always feel
some attachment to his trip. If not to Geneva, they definitely to his
experience with Frank.
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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