Dinnersharing: Casual Hospitality in the Collaborative Economy

The social web and mobile technologies have paved the way for digital platforms intermediating between individuals around the world, and gave rise to collaborative economic phenomena like peer-to-peer rentals, ridesharing, and social dining (also known as dinnersharing). From a technotopian perspective, it is digital technology that genuinely connects people, but we know little about how digital infrastructures mediate host-guest exchanges and how various conditions of hospitality (trust, openness and equality) are warranted and operationalized.

This chapter attempts to problematize the emergent social practice of dinnersharing, by disentangling the business model of the largest digitally facilitated social dining platform (EatWith), and the mechanisms enabling the carefree hosting of strangers and meeting locals. Second, the narrative strategies of commodifying homes as commercial arenas are analysed to highlight co-existing ulterior and altruistic aspects of digitally mediated hospitality. Thirdly, Bauman’s notion of cloakroom communities is invoked to reveal the “illusion of the social” in social dining. These three analytical departures will contribute to deconstruct the exclusive dining societas framed as equitable host-guest experiences and add further to the critique of the collaborative economy.