Social capital has many different definitions, so for simplicity I focused mainly on Putnum’s definition of Social Capital (from Bowling Alone): “The collective value of all social networks and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things from each other.” With respect to this definition I examined how these two communities encouraged trust, reciprocity, information and cooperation. Williams also argued that social capital is cyclical and is not the network itself, but rather social capital is generated by the network.
Before I begin any analysis I should give a little more background about both of these groups. Couch Surfing is an international network that has the goal of increasing global connections by offering free accommodation to travelers (ie. letting them sleep on your couch) with the hope that people will form friendships based on these real life hosting experiences. It’s a site where people join with the expectation of meeting other people on the site face to face. Because there is a lot of trust involved in letting people stay in your house, this site has interesting mechanisms including rating systems, evaluations, etc…. If you want to visit somewhere you can search by location for couch surfers in the nearby area who are available to host and request that they host you. Users have the choice to respond to your request and accept you or not.
I found the profile of a professor of a class in which I'm the TA. It’s kind of weird to find out she knows fencing or that she’s been to over 50 different countries through Couch Surfing.Unlike Couch Surfing, Hobbo Hotel doesn’t have a mission statement or defined purpose. It’s a virtual environment in which users can interact with other users via an avatar. You start off with a customizable avatar that owns one room in a large hotel. You can decorate your room, visit other people’s rooms, visit other hotel rooms, play games, chat with other users,… among many other features. One of the main features in Hobbo Hotel is buying furniture and decorating your room. There are two types of currency in the game: Credits which are bought with real money or sometimes won through events, and pixels which are received by accomplishing tasks and satisfying certain conditions. Habbo Hotel encourages users to explore the different features of the world by giving badges and pixels to users for participating in events.
My first interaction in Hobbo Hotel with a guide. I did ask him questions about Hobbo Hotel but I was nervous when talking to him.To examine social capital I think it’s important to look at the different social roles that users play within each community. Gleave et al. stated that the creation and maintenance of social spaces depends on the complex social ecology created by the interaction of several social roles. In Couch Surfing there are two major roles: the host and the hosted. Users will switch roles at times (sometimes hosting, sometimes being hosted), but much of the interaction of the event will take place offline. Initial contact might occur online, but like dating websites, the contact is meant to extend to face to face interactions. Online participation comes in the form of evaluating an experience or interaction with the person that hosted you or that you hosted. Another role in the community is that of a friend, ie. a person who can vouch for you and verify that you’re not a serial killer. All of these roles serve to increase the amount of social capital or trust within the couch surfing community. Generous hosts and gracious couch surfers make the experience of hosting someone positive, and encourage a growing network of friendships. Recommendations and positive reviews encourage civil behavior between people.
In Hobbo Hotel, I quickly noticed two types of social roles upon signing up. When I first began, I was given the option of asking for a guide to help me out since I was a first time user. I was in the role of a newbie and my guide, a more experienced Hobbo, helped me out by giving me some information about how the world works. This serves to ease the transition of a first time user and encourages helping others. I was rewarded 20 pixels for receiving help and I believe that my guide was also rewarded pixels for helping me out. This direct, point based incentive improved social capital within the community. I witnessed several people playing games, so another role could be a teammate. I noticed people also buy, sell, and trade items within the game. There was a host/visitor relationship in Hobbo Hotel as well although it was not as invested a relationship as the ones in couch surfing. Some users would open up their rooms for other people to hang out in. My room is only rated 3 points and all it has is a standard desk and chair, a lamp and a plant. I visited a few rooms with Disco Balls, intricate sets of furniture, flashy lights, etc… Although I feel that the decorating is more of an economic issue (a way for Sulake Co. to make money off of credit purchases) one could argue that the accumulation of furniture promotes social capital. People are encouraged to express themselves through decoration which leads to them exploring other rooms, meeting people, establishing relationships, etc….
Some other guy's room. It's pretty nice compared to minePutnam mentions two different types of social capital, “bridging” and “bonding.” Bridging is considered more inclusive and occurs when individuals of different backgrounds create tentative relationships. It’s more about breadth as opposed to depth. Bonding is considered more exclusive and people have stronger connections like those between close friends and family. When attempting to measure social capital in these two communities, one should take into account the differences between strong emotional ties between close friends and weak ties between acquaintances. Williams offers a matrix with online bonding, offline bonding, online bridging and offline bridging to separate and compare different types of social capital.
I think that when measuring social capital with respect to couch surfing, one must take into account the objective of the site. For instance, Couch Surfing encourages meeting with other users in real life so we can’t say the experience of a user is purely online. With Couch Surfing there is an online and an offline component to social capital. In comparison, I feel more comfortable arguing that Hobbo Hotel doesn’t have an offline component as there is nothing to suggest that Hobbo Hotel promotes offline social capital between members. Both sites encourage the building of bridging social capital, but I believe that only Couch Surfing offers a bonding experience. If we look at the criteria Williams used to access the degree of online bridging, I think both sites do a good job in promoting meeting a broad range of people, and meeting someone new online. Habbo Hotel is more likely to use chat room functions (I believe), but Couch Surfing has more external links to information. However, the bonding measures greatly favor Couch Surfing. I don’t think Habbo Hotel is a good means of keeping in touch with someone far away, but Couch Surfing seems to encourage it, especially after a hosting experience. With Couch Surfing, there also is more of a trust factor as people share a lot of personal information in their profiles to try and find the best matches for a host/ hosted relationship. I noticed many people use their real names and full names in their profile. Age, languages spoken, likes, dislikes, pictures, descriptions of your house, etc… are all on display. Habbo Hotel is more anonymous. Most users do not use their full name and you don’t really know what they look like, where they’re from, what they like or dislike, etc…
In his article on Trust and Modeling in E-Services, Massa summarizes several features of Couch Surfing which he categorized as a Social/Entertainment site. One of the mechanisms that he mentions that supports social capital is the users expressing level of trust in other users. In this way you not only know a user’s friends but also the depth of their relationship. Another mechanism of trust is activity history in which other people can view who the user hosted, by whom the user was hosted, and evaluation comments of those experiences by other users. You can also verify actual physical location through exchange of mail with administrators and also verification of personal identity through credit card payments.
I don’t know how Massa would classify Hobbo Hotel, but I don’t think it fits in with his other classifications. For one thing, Hobbo Hotel is not a website. Like Second Life, Hobbo Hotel is a virtual environment. I would still classify it under Social/Entertainment. One mechanism that supports social interaction is having built in activities in the environment. For example, there are games people can play with others in the hotel. This gives people a reason and opportunity to meet and interact with new people. There are also in game incentives (pixels) and badges that mark social worth. I noticed that I would periodically get pixels in the game for no reason, and I think that you’re rewarded just for being logged in and walking around the hotel. I also noticed some people doing character role playing. For instance I saw one character who said she was looking for a “boyfriend” in her avatar description. I’ve also seen advertisement that said “looking for a daughter” while browsing some events. It seems like people do role playing and create imaginary social situations just to have something to do.
Overall I feel that Couch Surfing does a good job in establishing mechanisms of trust. There are a few things I would suggest to ensure that users don’t take advantage of others. One thing I noticed in Couch Surfing is that there is no mechanism that prevents people from only coach surfing and never hosting. The Allen article on social networks of trust touched on the idea that often times what’s best for the individual is not what’s best for the social capital of the community.
The classic cooperation paradox applied to CouchSurfing: Being selfish (ie. Only couch surfing and never hosting) is the most gain (financially speaking) but the collective outcome is socially irrational (if everyone wanted to travel but no one hosted, then the system would fall apart.)
I’ve seen some other social networking sites like Book Mooch that implemented a system to prevent people from only being hosted and never hosting. Book Mooch is a site in which users can request to receive and ship out books. On that site, a user must send at least 1 book for every 2 that he or she receives. This ensures that a user doesn’t simply receive a ton of books without shipping any out. A similar system could be implemented on Couch Surfing in which a user must host at least 1 person for every 2 times he or she gets hosted by someone else. Couch Surfing explicitly stated that even people who can’t host (ie. Don’t have an available place for others to stay) can still sign up provided that they anticipate being able to host in the future. While not making hosting a requirement shows a lot of trust in the users, ultimately it may cause people to take advantage of others.
Another potential problem I saw with Couch Surfers is that it may be difficult to initially engage in interactions with others because you don’t have any starting credentials. For example, if I just joined Couch Surfers and didn’t know anyone else on the site, I believe it would be very difficult to establish relationships. One of the good features of Couch Surfer is the ability to comment on your hosting experiences with other members. However, people use this as criteria to determine someone’s trustworthiness. While this is great for people who have hosted and proven themselves to be good travelers, it could be discouraging for people who are just starting and don’t have such credentials.
For example when I joined Couch Surfers I thought about how difficult it would be for me to host someone. Honolulu has a lot of users and why would someone want to stay with me, when he or she could stay with a person with a lot of positive reviews (like my high school friend Shawn who I found on Couch Surfers). I also found a professor that I work for on Couch Surfers and her profile is a lot more interesting than mine. She has a much nicer apartment, speaks more languages, been to more places has more friends and references, etc… I’m not sure how to remedy this exactly but I think that there should be a guide or introduction sequence to help initial users establish a base of trust in the system, similar to that in Hobbo Hotel. As a first time user I felt a little intimidated by other members and their established contacts. Initial frustration for first time users may cause them to leave the community.
My friend Shawn has so many good reviews. Why would you hang out with me when you can hang out with a guy who will serenade you to sleep?I could suggest many features to improve the experience of Hobbo Hotel, but that would require making it more like Second Life or WoW. I think it would be nice to have user generated furniture like in Second Life. This would allow a user to express even more individuality when setting up his or her room. Another thing I would like is having areas in the game to chat about specific topics of interest. I felt awkward starting conversations with someone just because my avatar happened to be in the same room. The only person I talked to was the guide who I summoned when I first started in the hotel.
From personal experience, I feel that virtual environments should offer a variety of quests, minigames and themed events in order to improve social capital. Hobbo Hotel has a few basic missions but I think if there were more in depth missions that required collaboration, people would build up a greater system of trust. Working together to solve a problem builds camaraderie and leads to stronger ties between people. I like the fact that pixels are given out for simple quests like asking for a guide and I think more features like this would encourage more interactions.
I’ve seen some themed events in virtual environments like MapleStory that I thought were very encouraging for social capital. I read somewhere that Hobbo Hotel has events but I couldn’t find them. I think themed events (for example a valentine’s day ball) would take advantage of the visual properties of Habbo Hotel. One of the advantages of a virtual environment like Habbo Hotel is that it has interactive graphical features like a decorative environment. I believe virtual worlds constantly need to add new environments and features, otherwise people get bored with the world and leave. WoW takes advantage of this by always expanding the world and adding new quests.
Another thing that Habbo Hotel lacks is a grouping element which helps to build bonding relationships. This may go along with collaborative quests since people would form small groups. I think the concept of “guilds” strengthens bonds because people become more exclusive and find a common identity within a smaller group than the greater population.
A lounge in Habbo Hotel.Overall it was difficult to compare the two communities because they had different objectives. CouchSurfing has a defined purpose (hosting people, getting hosted), while Habbo Hotel is more recreational. In Couch Surfing users are encouraged to have offline interactions and relationships with other users to promote and establish friendships. In Hobbo Hotel users interact pretty much within the constraints of the world do so for many different reasons.
The Ellison article on college students and facebook mentions that previous research suggested that Facebook users engaged in searching for people they had an offline connection with more often that complete strangers. Somehow I think Couch Surfing is different because the “objective” of the site is to find people to host you, and typically there isn’t much contact between you and those people. Users might chat a bit and set up a meeting, but overall there’s a good possibility that these people are meeting face to face for the first time because of Couch Surfing. Also, Couch Surfing appeals to a specific niche group. It seems like most people on there are extroverts who have a lot of experience travelling. You also need to be somewhat financially stable to afford travel and have a stable housing situation in order to host.
*************************************************
One question that I’ve been thinking about deals with evaluating a user’s social value based on incentives and other visible markers. For instance a user’s level in answerbag affects the way someone might perceive him or her. Users in answerbag celebrated Firebrand reaching level 100 due to her contributions to the community. However, you don’t see parties in facebook for people who have achieved a certain number of walls posts or a certain number of friends. How do the measures of status in a community affect social capital within the community?
In Couch Surfing social worth/status is in the form of friendships, the degrees of those friendships, positive comments, number and quality of host/hosted experiences and response rate. It seems like an individual user’s friendships are an important criteria in gaining opportunities with that site. Social worth in Hobbo Hotel is in the form of badges, pixels, coins, the quality of your room, and the number of friends on your friend list. However, I don’t think more highly of a user who has a lot of friends in Hobbo Hotel whereas I put more trust in a user on Couch Surfing who has many friends and positive relationships. How does the perception of social value in these social communities affect interactions between people in those communities? Is social worth of users in one community more important to interactions than the social worth of users in another community? What makes it so?
To explore this issue I wanted to look at two sites designed so that users who interact online also have opportunities and are encouraged to meet face to face. I’ve been talking with BJ about these issues and we might study Couch Surfing and OKCupid. For Couch Surfing I plan to examine the aspects of a person's profile that encourage trust. Since positive reviews seem like they establish trust I want to examine the number of positive and negative reviews for a number of random Couch Surfers and see how that correlates with the amount of close friends and the total number of interactions. I believe BJ will do a similar analysis with OkCupid (but don't quote me on that as we're still discussing the project.)
Hobbo Hotel seems quite similar to Second Life...except it's 2D. There's people setting up rooms, collecting stuff, presenting their rooms, going on missions, looking for virtual roleplayers like family roleplays, virtual currency that you have to buy offline (of course). It also reminded me of the MOOs discussed in the Dibbell article with people just creating spaces and hanging out. Which is funny, because I've heard gamers say "Second Life is pointless, there's no quests!" and yet many of them played MOOs...
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, even though I feel the vast majority of people do want the structured questing of something like guilds, there are people who just want roleplaying and I think they're drawn more to worlds like Hobbo Hotel and Second Life. I did text roleplaying many many years ago, and it eventually became the genesis of a yet-unpublished novel.
I think there's also a lot of finger-pointing among users of non-major social computing mechanisms (by major I mean facebook etc) to make certain people feel better than others ("We have guilds and kill monsters so we're better than people who just sit around and talk all day!!"). I don't think you were that strongly worded about it, but I've hung around and been the girlfriend of online gamers multiple times and there is always this "We're superior to Y group" dynamic going on. Humans in general do this, but it's a little more exaggerated in the gamers I've seen. (Not to mention the furry hate and the continual misogynist/gaybashing/racist comments. Not everyone, obviously, but it's become a gamer culture norm.)
Anyway, I think your topic is a good one. You can similarly talk about bulletin board post counts and how people with high post counts are considered important and sometimes allowed on parts of the board that others are not, but on the other hand people who post comments to raise their post count are seen as cheaters and often banned. And remember, to refer up to my last paragraph, social worth is completely relative - probably the vast majority of people find Couch Surfing more socially worthwhile than Hobbo Hotel, but I'm sure there are some that value the latter more than the former.
One problem for a community like Couch Surfing is that how trust worthy a particular review is. I can't imagine one would give a bad review after he/she just slept on the couch of another person. Face-to-face contact actually reduced the possibility of an honest review. For a community like eBay, since there is no human contact, I would assume that review is more candid. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteI suppose a good purpose for Second Life and Habbo Hotel would be to bring creativity to the forefront - whether it is creating another persona or a virtual space to hang out. The reward isn't necessarily the badges the user accumulates, but more about how proud he/she can be of their place in virtual space. I think it's like when we decorate our own homes as a matter of expression.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Facebook and establishing some kind of status for the number of wall posts we make, I don't think that's the real reason why we walk away from the site feeling "good" about our participation. I have a friend that checks FB two to three times a day and has added Twitter to her postings, whereas another friend simply turned off the email alerts to keep her own mailbox from getting full. It's the extent of bonding/bridging that they want to get from being part of the site. The friend who rarely checks FB doesn't find extra rewards from being a member and the other seems to enjoy the back and forth exchanges she manages to get from a variety of online friends.
Status isn't a byproduct of the site, rather it's the increase in bonding social capital that's truly sought.
Just my two cents/pixels. :o)
Wow, you must spend lot of time on this topic. It takes me half hour to read through your poost.
ReplyDeleteFrankly say, it's the first time I heard of "Couch Surfing,” and “Habbo Hotel”. I agree with DNI that it is very difficult to rate trust worthy a particular review is. Like all issues in the virtual world, it's very difficult to evaluate the information you got.
Manda - I downloaded Second Life a few days after this post for a project in my digital government class. Being new to both, I feel like the depth and complexity of SL makes it very different from Hobbo Hotel. Hobbo Hotel is more CyWorld in that it's purely social with a little bit of room decorating. In SL I've explored lots of educational areas like museums, second life versions of College Campuses, etc..
ReplyDeleteBJ and I changed our final project to analyzing trust and social capital and how offline components for sites (specifically online sites that encourage offline interaction) change this dynamic. One of the reasons is the point you brought up: Social worth is completely relative and thus hard to measure empirically.
DNI - One of my thoughts about Couch Surfing reviews is that the lack of anonymity makes them biased. I would be weary about writing a negative review, especially if the person I'm reviewing has a lot of friends. I've noticed that there are very few negative reviews (I browsed 100 or so profiles to find a negative review).
J_Mastin - I agree that building up or customizing avatar or your room can bring more enjoyment than collecting badges or medals. However, I do think that the mechanics of a site dictate how people measure their status against each other. There are many people who seek things purely because of perceived worth from other people. I know a lot of kids from high school who chose colleges simply by looking up the top rated schools from the US News and World Report. If answerbag didn't list the top 5 contributors per week, I would have never specifically sought out NUNYA and answered her questions. I think that having a leveling up feature like in answerbag is specifically designed to show status.
Yili - I don't think a particular review is worth much, but when added up multiple positive reviews are worth something. When you see a person who has 48 positive reviews and 0 negative reviews I think that person is probably more reliable than someone who has only 1 positive review.