Open AccessConveying the Message of Trust through Written Texts in CouchSurfing.org
Author(s) -
Alexander Ronzhyn,
Eugenia Kuznetsova
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
synthesis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1791-5856
pISSN - 1791-5155
DOI - 10.12681/syn.16179
Subject(s) - hospitality , identity (music) , social network (sociolinguistics) , linguistics , world wide web , psychology , computer science , social media , tourism , philosophy , political science , law , physics , acoustics
The present article describes the results of research on online identity construction during participation in hospitality social networks. One type of user submitted data, references, was analysed to uncover and describe the way trust is conveyed in Couchsurfing.org. Through corpus-based linguistic analysis, authors explore the relative importance of different types of user interactions in the network and describe how references contribute to the framework of trust built within the Couchsurfing.org social network. Among the findings are the increased use of adjectives in references and the concepts used by the Couchsurfing management. Trust is seldom used in the references directly, but rather expressed through euphemisms and metaphors.