Phenomenological research of mobile personality lifestyle formation in transcultural communication
Nowadays Internet revolution has already covered all spheres of society. Game animations, imitating real life, as well as actively constructing artificial virtual worlds, already significantly substitute authentic communication and life of people, especially youth. Such active involvement of young people in new, unusual and very attractive "ersatz-reality" points the basic problems of authentic personality efficiency maintaining, her development and self-realization. In this context, the study of contemporary alternative tourism, in which a real meeting of network (on-line) and interpersonal (off-line) communicative worlds of its participants takes place, acquires a special prognostic significance. Travelers are always among the first to test new communication technologies. One of such new phenomena have become virtual hospitality networks. As a vivid example of a global Internet community based on the principles of trust and exchange the international hospitality network Couchsurfing can be cited. Today, couchsurfing is the most popular virtual guest network and unites more than 14 million people from 200 thousand cities of the world, is a website where people from all over the world are registered who are ready to provide accommodation free of charge and to assist each other while traveling. To examine the authenticity of the tourist experience of the hospitality network participants, affecting significant changes of the modern person, as a methodological framework, we will describe and offer a narrative approach. The study was attended by 35 people. 20 respondents from 17 cities of Russia, and also 15 respondents from other countries. The study sample comprised 23 women aged from 20 to 28 years old and 12 men from 21 to 40 years. In this article we present the results of the content analysis of respondents interviews, revealing the prevailing themes in the structure of their narratives. In this way, a detailed phenomenological analysis of the experience of the participants in the project of couchsurfing using the narrative method is able to contribute to research related to sharing experiences and sharing, opening up an additional perspective of shifting the emphasis on the opportunity to share with other material resources, as well as the prospect of comparative study of specific types empirical capital, which can promote self-development as the result of such an exchange. Couchsurfing is extremely rich in cultural diversity, which is of scientific interest in terms of how participants from different countries and cultures coexist and cooperate with each other. The study of the relationship between cultural differences, personal preferences, the process of building trust and attachments can help in explaining and overcoming various psychological obstacles both at the level of global and local communities.
Keywords
каучсерфинг, психология мобильности, виртуальные гостевые сети, онлайн идентичность, эмпирический капитал, социальный капитал, теория взаимного альтруизма, космополитическая идентичность, доверие, нарративная психология, couchsurfing, psychology of mobility, hospitality exchange networks, online identity, experiential capital, social capital, theory of reciprocal altruism, cosmopolitan identity, psychology of trustAuthors
Name | Organization | |
Nekludova Snezhana V. | Tomsk State University | s.v.neklyudova@gmail.com |
Kabrin Valery I. | Tomsk State University | kabrin@list.ru |
References
Phenomenological research of mobile personality lifestyle formation in transcultural communication | Sibirskiy Psikhologicheskiy Zhurnal – Siberian Journal of Psychology. 2018. № 68. DOI: 10.17223/17267080/68/4