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The Commodification of the Couch

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The Commodification of the Couch ! Department of Informatics & Media Digital Media & Society Uppsala University, Sweden ! ! The Commodification of the Couch The Commons vs. Commodification: A Dialectical Analysis of Hospitality Exchange Networks ! Master’s Thesis Supervisors: Jakob Svensson, PhD, Uppsala University James Losey, Stockholm University ! Author: Simon Schöpf [email protected] ! Uppsala, May 2014 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! “Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je älter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: der gestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir.” “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” – Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft ! ! ! !ii ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Simon Schöpf, 2014. Some rights reserved. See Appendix IV for license. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) !iii Abstract Hospitality exchange (HospEx) networks – online platforms facilitating the connection between a traveler and a local resident – embody many of the cyber-utopian promises intrinsic to the Web as it started out 25 years ago. Such sites have often been conceptualized as a new and daring trend in a booming ‘sharing industry’ and have been researched for topics such as trust, reputation, and online identities. Yet, a more critical look uncovers that crucial issues of ownership, power, digital labour, and organizational structures have often been left out. To fill this gap, this thesis investigates upon the antagonistic struggle between the commons and processes of commodification in the light of critical theory and political economy. The research shows that examples with characteristics of both concepts are manifested in the niche social networking space of HospEx platforms. The biggest of those platforms, Couchsurfing.org, changed its organizational orientation from a non-profit, commons-based project towards a for-profit company in 2011 – an instance of commodification. An analysis of both quantitative and qualitative community data shows that the transformation consequently concerns a member on multiple levels. The structural change of ownership results in a loss of transparency and privacy, an alteration of the platform’s integrity, a sacrifice of the ‘uniqueness’ of the community, and a differing relationship between the user and the platform. To shed light on an antagonistic force and suggest an alternative, community-based governance approach, the work further explores the specifics of a platform guided by the logic of the commons. Interviews with volunteers of the non-commercial, non-profit HospEx platform BeWelcome.org helped to deepen an understanding of how a digital commons can be sustained and what challenges they face. The thesis concludes that the developments observed on Couchsurfing are not an exception but rather characteristic and part of a broader trend manifested in all areas of digital media, and indeed modern society in general: commodification processes frequently jeopardize the commons and incorporate them into the logic of capital. ! Keywords: commons, digital commons, commodification, critical theory, political economy of communication, Couchsurfing, BeWelcome, hospitality exchange network, hospex !iv Table of Contents ! Abstract iv Table of Contents v List of Figures and Tables viii Acknowledgements ix 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Background & Rationale 1 1.2. Research Questions & Goals 2 1.3. Relevance of Thesis 2 1.4. Thesis Overview 4 2. Literature Review 5 2.1. Introduction: A Short History of the Web 5 2.2. Critical Internet Studies 11 2.2.1. Classical Political Economy 11 2.2.2. Political Economy of Communication 12 2.2.3. Critical Theory 15 2.2.4. Theoretical Framework - A Critical Theory of Social Media 16 2.3. The Commons versus Commodification 19 2.3.1. Introduction 19 2.3.2. The Commons 20 2.3.3. The Digital Commons 24 2.3.4. Processes of Commodification 26 2.3.5. The Commodification of the Digital Commons 27 2.3.6. Chapter Summary - Commodification of Everything? 30 !v 2.4. Web Users as Consumers or Participants 34 2.4.1. Introduction 34 2.4.2. The User as a Commodity 34 2.4.3. The User as a Participant 38 2.5. Case Study: Hospitality Exchange Platforms 42 2.5.1. Introduction 42 2.5.2. The Emergence of Hospitality Exchange Platforms 42 2.5.3. The Commodification of the Couch 43 2.5.4. Existing Couchsurfing Research 47 2.5.5. A Non-profit HospEx Platform: BeWelcome 49 2.6. Literature Review - Concluding Thoughts 51 3. Methodology 52 3.1. Introduction & Research Design 52 3.2. Data Collection 53 3.2.1. Online Ethnography 53 3.2.2. Quantitative Survey 54 3.2.3. Qualitative Survey 55 3.2.4. In-Depth Interviews 56 3.3. Limitations of Data 57 4. Results & Analysis 59 4.1. Introduction 59 4.2. Presentation of Quantitative Results 60 4.3. Presentation of Qualitative Results 63 4.3.1. Introduction 63 4.3.2. Quantitative Questionnaire 63 4.3.3. Qualitative Questionnaires 65 !vi 4.3.4. In-Depth Interviews 73 4.4. Research Questions 80 5. Conclusion 94 5.1. Future Research 99 Epilogue 100 Appendix I 1 Appendix II III Appendix III V Appendix IV VII Works Cited VIII !vii List of Figures and Tables ! Figure 2.1: ‘Time Magazine’ Covers, 2006 and 2010 8 Figure 2.2: Tweeting Gas Stations and Cows with a Facebook-Page 9 Figure 2.3: Offline and Online User Protests against Advertisements 30 Figure 2.4: Couchsurfing’s Growth Rate 47 Figure 4.1: Participant’s Membership Distribution in Years 60 Figure 4.2: Participant’s Activeness on the Couchsurfing Website 60 Figure 4.3: Participant’s Motivation to Participate in the Couchsurfing Project 61 Figure 4.4: Participant’s Knowledge of Couchsurfing’s Transition 61 Figure 4.5: Participant’s Personal Feelings about the Transition 62 Figure 4.6: Participant’s Personal Feelings about the Quality of the Couchsurfing Website 62 Figure 4.7: Qualitative Participant’s Membership Distribution in Years 66 Figure 4.8: Participant’s Knowledge and Usage of other HospEx Platforms 69 Figure 4.9: The Donations Bar, as seen on BeWelcome’s front page 76 Figure 4.10: Couchsurfing’s Sign Up Process in 2014 86 Figure 4.11: Correlation of Search and Sign-up rates for Couchsurfing and BeWelcome 88 ! ! Table 2.1: Three Moral Economies 14 Table 2.2: Top 10 Websites Worldwide 29 Table 2.3: Three Hospitality Exchange Platforms in Comparison 50 !viii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank all participants from both the Couchsurfing and the BeWelcome communities for so many valuable and insightful comments – yet more than that, for all those ‘non-commodify-able’ experiences I was fortunate to share with so many of you awesome people all over the planet. All, let’s keep the dream alive and make the world a better place, one couch at a time! Also, a sincere ‘tack så mycket!’ to my two supervisors, Jakob and James, for trudging through what used to be extensive amounts of heavy theoretical discussions, and providing valuable guidance for making the thesis to what it is now. May the force be with you. Furthermore, as this thesis sets somewhat of an end-point to two years spent in Uppsala, this seems to be an appropriate space to also thank all my precious friends: only together could we be strong enough to endured the icy bitterness of Swedish winters. Men efter vintern kommer våren, those two years were wonderful, exciting, and educational, I am glad to have shared so many cultural insights with you, and hope to do even more so in our bright futures. And of course, the obligatory Danke! to my family for supporting my decision to once-again leaving the mountains behind and venture abroad, but just to come back and see beauty through a broadened vision. Most of all though, thanks to you, Maria, for staying ever-patient and enriching my life even across the Baltic sea. ! To all of you, in common: Thanks, danke, tack! !ix 1. Introduction 1.1. Background & Rationale The task of the thesis at hand is to study the relation of the commons and commodification processes on social media platforms. The commons are, based on the work of political economist Elinor Ostrom, to be understood as a resource shared by a group of people that is subject to social dilemmas (Ostrom 1990), whereas commodification, from a critical political economy perspective, refers to the “process of transforming use values into exchange values” (Mosco 1996 141). Internet researchers often neglect to critically engage with issues of power, digital labor, and processes of commodification when engaging with so-called ‘social media’ phenomena. Furthermore, important questions revolving around ownership and the commons are frequently left out. Using a illustrating case study exemplifying both the commodification process and the expansion of the digital commons, the thesis is striving to connect theoretical issues around power structures, political struggles, participatory democracy, and the strengthening of the commons with empirical data. The history of the Internet and the World Wide Web, departing from the usual utopian discourse, can also be told as a story of increasing commodification, from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to the IPO of Facebook, and therefore as a story of struggle between commerce and the commons. Arm in arm goes the history of consumer culture and advertising, both shaping and shaped through the emergence of the Internet. An analysis of platforms fitting into the ‘social media’ frame promises fruitful results since the strive for a co-operative society is, at least in theory, especially alive in those realms. Taking the case of hospitality exchange platforms, a niche of social networking sites connecting travelers with local residents on a global scale as empirical grounds, the research strives to investigate whether the current model of informational capitalism potentially endangers societally valuable projects by commodifying the ownership structures; the resulting strive for profits (and not necessarily user satisfaction) may have threatening and negative consequences for all the users of platforms and society at large.
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