Tubería Flexible en el Área de Terminación

As mentioned in section 4.3.2 (References), the references system was very important in assisting members with their trust decisions. This finding seems to align with Koszewska’s (2008) finding that her respondents also believed that references are important in their decision-making process.

Theoretically, the CouchSurfing references system could be associated with two of Nissenbaum’s (2001) conditions for the formation of trust: the first is the notion of “history and reputation”, whereby each reference constitutes a record of an interaction between surfer and host as well as an indication of how each party perceives of the other, thereby forming the reputation of the members involved; the second falls under Nissenbaum’s discussion of “contextual factors”, in which fidelity and betrayal are publicized as well as the presence of reward and punishment should fidelity or betrayal occur. In the context of CouchSurfing, the publication of positive, neutral and negative references would be analogous to the publication of fidelity and betrayal. The presence of positive references on a profile would likely “reward” the individual with having requests more easily accepted in the future as well as

building a good reputation amongst the community, while the opposite would likely be true should a member have negative references on their profile.

Many of the interviewed non-members placed great importance on vouched and verified statuses as ways to confirm identity and demonstrate commitment to the community. Moreover, verified status was perceived as more important than vouched. References were viewed with scepticism by 4 of the non-members because references do not seem to provide useful information. As well, there seems to be an unusually high number of positive references.

The fact that only 5.7% of the entire CouchSurfing membership has decided to complete the verification process (The CouchSurfing Project, 2009) perhaps indicates that it is not perceived by the members as an important mechanism to help infer trustworthiness. This may possibly explain why the members who were interviewed had viewed verified status as a nice designation to have but did not perceive it as an essential factor in their trust decisions.

In a way, the $25 donation that is involved in the verification process can be compared to Resnick and Zeckhauser’s (2002) “initiation dues.” Resnick and Zeckhauser view these dues as a method of keeping out people who have less than honest intentions. As previously indicated in section 4.3.3 (Vouched and Verified Statuses), some of the interviewed non- members of this study viewed this $25 donation as a sign of commitment. The question of whether this monetary component increases the perception of another member’s level of trustworthiness is an intriguing one. While it was not an issue this study intended to address, it would be a worthwhile topic to pursue in the future. As well, this issue is particularly relevant with the emergence of AirBnB, a similar service to CouchSurfing but members pay each other for accommodations instead of a service model based on the goodwill and generosity of its members.

The fact that only a small percentage (7.2%) of CouchSurfers have been vouched (The CouchSurfing Project, 2009) perhaps indicates that the vouching system is in fact working, that is, only those deemed vouch-worthy have been vouched. This would seem to contradict Lauterbach and Shah’s (2008) finding that members seem to provide vouches indiscriminately, even to those who do not have close friendship ties. Granted, Lauterbach

and Shah’s study was only conducted within the CouchSurfing community in France so their findings cannot be generalised to the greater population.

Amongst Nissenbaum’s (2001) conditions for trust to occur, Nissenbaum mentioned Seligman’s belief that familiarity, similarity and shared values are important to building trust. Both members and non-members in this study have mentioned the importance of seeking similarity, affinity or “common ground” as they examined the profiles of CouchSurfing members. One member even mentioned that a request would be declined if it does not seem like the requestor and the member have any shared interests or affinity, even if the request was properly written.

Furthermore, in the absence of physical interaction, the way in which the information is presented and sent is vital to getting a positive response. This seems to echo Ellison et al.’s (2006) findings that online daters rely upon cues such as time stamp, writing style, and length of message to help form impressions of others in the community when physical cues are lacking. CouchSurfers seem to be relying upon these strategies and perhaps even building a set of information literacy skills and adopting clever strategies to discern those who have put some care and attention into crafting their requests from those who do not seem to bother with the effort of even personalizing their requests. This lack of attentiveness could potentially lead a potential host to believe that s/he is merely seen as a provider of a free place to stay instead of someone whom the requester would genuinely like to get to know first and foremost as a person.

Lastly, it appears that trust is not something that can be automated. For example, even if a search in the CouchSurfing database is performed with all the desired criteria, one may not end up wholly trusting the persons in the generated results. For example, the respondent who noted that if a request contained the “secret word” but the member did not have much affinity with the requestor, then the request was denied. Or, if the request was composed in an acceptable way to the host but the secret word was not there, then the member might accept it in any case. Hence, trust is entirely subjective and situational and involves feelings and emotions. In fact, in some cases, the respondents expressed that they based their decisions on a “gut feeling.”