Sharing the Silence

Why do volunteers in the sharing economy fail to leave feedback of negative experiences? This short research study was completed as part of an Open University Masters in Applied Linguistics. It examines interviews of four volunteers traveling in South East Asia and applies theories of linguistics such as Brown and Levinson's politeness theory to understand experiences. The websites Workaway and Couchsurfing and also examined and compared to job seeking sites to consider instances of genre confusion. The actual study is relatively short with extensive appendixes including the transcribed interviews, profiles copied from the Internet and visual screenshots of the websites concerned.