ABSTRACT
This chapter is dedicated to analysing how people perceive their relationship with the short-term rental platform Airbnb. The mainstream discourse emphasises how users are usually emotionally attached to social relationships developed on sharing economy platforms; we question this discourse in two ways. Firstly, we question whether Airbnb is actually a “sharing” platform by measuring the concentration of revenues for the Venice, Italy. Secondly, we analyse the imaginary of Airbnb users by focusing on all the reviews left by visitors to the city of Venice. The first step in our analysis leverages automated text analysis in order to find out clusters of discourse; then, we use qualitative content analysis in order to understand how users communicate affection. Eventually, we show that, just as the revenues concentrate in the hands of a few powerful users, the imaginary becomes increasingly standardised.
