Conveying the Message of Trust through Written Texts in CouchSurfing.org

Abstract

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.