The internet and online communities

Provide the web address and the name of the community you are investigating. What is the brief or focus of this community? What services are provided? How interactive is this site? How can people contribute? Consider material presented during the lecture and make comment on why people choose to contribute to this community. What is it they are seeking? Cut and paste an example of the type of topics being discussed (you may have to provide a context to your excerpt). Considering material presented during the course and make comment on the potential ethical issues that may arise in this community e.g. lack of identity and accountability. Consider material presented during the lecture and make comment on the benefits this community holds over traditional notions of community e.g. communities reliant on geographic proximity . Consider material presented during the lecture and make comment what this community lacks or can not provide which traditional communities can.

This week I checked out the couch surfing community which can be reached by going to http://www.couchsurfing.org. Once here you have access to a community of people who all share the common interest of travel whether this be providing a couch and meeting new people or going to new places and experiencing the life in that community through staying with a kind local found on this website. This is reflected by the sites mission statement "CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance, and facilitate cultural understanding."

To become part of this community you first need to create a profile and become a member. Once you have completed this process members are able to contribute to the community through offering a couch (or even just a coffee) to be slept on or if you are travelling make arrangements to stay with someone whose couch is being offered. This site provides a link for communication between couch surfers and couch owners around the globe but really it’s up to the individual how they make use of the site.

People place postings on the site such as the following, about someone’s personal view and experience of couch surfing.
“I CouchSurfed across the continent of Africa, from Pretoria to Cairo, and because of the CouchSurfers there, and this Web site, it was by far the most memorable trip of my life. The hospitality that greeted me was amazing, the personalities I encountered were the greatest, and the CouchSurfers I stayed with were beyond expectations. They turned an already epic journey into one that made me feel like an African. I can only hope to host them all some day, or at least be as good a CouchSurfing host to a stranger as they were to me."
Chris Tribbey (United States) June 23rd, 2010.

Safety is a big issue surrounding this community. People are putting themselves into a vulnerable situation by staying with people who are still random strangers in an unfamiliar environment. The site understands that there are many safety considerations and provides the best safety measures available (verification, references and vouching, safety advice) however even with these in place couch surfing still poses a lot of risk and really it is up to the individual to look out for themselves and use their common sense.

When looking at this community in comparison to traditional communities they are very much related and compared to many other online communities this one has much greater links really.
With other online communities people communicate and learn about each other through a computer screen however for couch surfers the computer screen is just the beginning. The computer screen links people from vast communities across the globe and brings them together. It provides the opportunity for people to leave their own community and get to stay with locals where they can experience firsthand how locals from other communities live. From reading the entries on the site I can see that after couch surfing some people feel really connected to the community they have visited and continue to keep in touch with them. That is the reason I chose to look at this site........it offers more than a computer screen relationship.