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- Convenors:
-
Philipp Budka
(University of Vienna)
Elisabetta Costa (University of Antwerp)
Sahana Udupa (LMU Munich)
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- Chair:
-
Sahana Udupa
(LMU Munich)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 14 University Square (UQ), 01/007
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to rethink work, value and labor, and lived experiences bundled around them in mediated contexts, and what consequences they have for how inequalities are reproduced in the digital age.
Long Abstract:
Digital media and technologies have been entangled in multiple and complex ways in defining what constitutes work as well as the experience and organization of everyday work routines. These entanglements are starkly felt in the current context of the pandemic and reduced mobility. Digital media have impacted the ways people perform their work, experience family and friend relationships, organize their times, and manage the boundaries between work and private life. At the same time, digital capitalist logics continue to define the contours of work, leisure and labor, as commercial digital media companies enlist user interactivity for monetizable data relations and through precarious labor arrangements to perform digital activities ranging from content moderation to designing platform architectures. These developments have shaped the conditions that define who is paid and unpaid, what is valued and devalued, and how work is demarcated, (out)sourced and appropriated.
For this panel, we invite contributions that ethnographically examine work and digital media through analytical scales ranging from felt experiences of delocalized working practices and "virtualization" of work with digital interactions to global inequalities in digital work and different forms of precarious labor. We also invite explorations of initiatives that have creatively utilized digital media to subvert and challenge unequal conditions of work, as well as to make "work" more humane in these pressing times. The panel aims to rethink work, value and labor, and lived experiences bundled around them in mediated contexts, and what consequences they have for how inequalities are reproduced in the digital age.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper argues for a decolonial perspective on content moderation labor involved in flagging, reviewing, downranking, quarantining and removing the ‘scum’ in the digital pipeline – the vast amounts of violent, toxic and extreme content that circulate online.
Paper long abstract:
This paper argues for a decolonial perspective on content moderation labor involved in flagging, reviewing, downranking, quarantining and removing the ‘scum’ in the digital pipeline – the vast amounts of violent, toxic and extreme content that circulate online. An influential strand of scholarship has examined how the deployment of artificial intelligence and automation can not only address the problem of volume of online content, match the hectic pace of digital exchange and reduce costs for companies, but it can decrease human discretion and emotional labor in the removal of objectionable content. This techno-optimistic nod to the daunting labor of content moderation however elides the vast global disparities in content moderation, complexity of language and audiovisuality in online exchange, and the process of iteration involving community annotators. Building on interactions with factcheckers during the course of the project, “AI4Dignity” (2021-2022), which is building a collaborative process model for extreme speech detection, this paper shows how content moderation labor is not only devalorized within the hierarchies of global corporations but the touted technological remedies, appeals to “crowd sourcing” and third-party content moderation arrangements reproduce colonial extractive logics of digital capitalism.
Paper short abstract:
Based on the ethnographic research conducted in Vienna, I explore how youths negotiate chronic unemployment, boredom and stagnated coming-of-age against the backdrop of digital literacy narratives that promise empowerment and new occupational fields in exchange for productive digital practices.
Paper long abstract:
As digitization seeps into homes, offices, and factories alike, disenfranchised youth are often portrayed as losers of digital transformation within widespread digital literacy and digital empowerment narratives. Various review studies indicate that youths with limited socio-economic resources and lower formal education are generally less likely to employ digital technologies strategically and productively for school and career purposes. In a similar vein, the Austrian digital curriculum promotes digital literacy as a means to enable students to enter "promising occupational fields". However, when their ideological underpinnings remain unquestioned, such benevolent policies may reinforce the implicit notion that youths are responsible for freeing themselves from occupational constraints by practicing digital skills deemed as productive and efficient, even in their leisure time. Building on my ethnographic research in youth centers, schools, and youth coaching facilities in Vienna between 2018 and 2022, I complicate the story of seemingly deficient digital practices of youths negotiating unemployment, fragmented biographies, poverty, lack of role models, discrimination, stratified school system, and limited career choices inscribed into their bodies. I argue that digital literacy comes in many forms and is intertwined with profound socio-political and economic exclusions of the "invisible children" (Lemish, 2021) of the Global North; exclusions that are neither caused by the lack of digital literacy, nor can they be solved through "proficient" and "productive" digital practices that would seem oddly out of place.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on interviews with beauty gig workers in Hyderabad, this presentation will focus on the use of WhatsApp groups by workers and the subsequent creation of whisper networks to collectivize, resist, and exercise agency.
Paper long abstract:
Over the last decade, the platform economy has helped generate more jobs and organize work that has largely been unorganized and informal. However, the 'quality of jobs' has yet to see an improvement. Protests by women workers against Urban Company (UC) point to these issues. While these protests are certainly a public expression of the angst of women workers against UC, workers also face difficulties in dealing with customers. Drawing on my interviews with beauty gig workers in Hyderabad, I explore the use of WhatsApp groups by workers and the subsequent creation of whisper networks to collectivize, resist, and exercise agency. The term "whisper network" refers to a thriving system of informal communication amongst women to warn each other about male sexual predators within their immediate environment. Departing from the dominant notion that men are the subjects of whisper networks, this chapter uses an intersectional feminist lens to broaden its scope to include caste and class.
Paper short abstract:
This paper responds to media imaginaries of tech work by addressing ethnographically how the platform workforce is trained in automated environments and how they learn to cooperate with and trick the algorithmic management of the work experience.
Paper long abstract:
Automated technologies are making the 'workplace' more complex, and thus the processes that constitute it are harder to define. Platform workers are exemplary of this, their (dis)embedded labour experience (Wood, et al, 2019) shifts key work processes to new realms such as Social Media and algorithmic management, which have become new categories through which to understand 'work' and how it is imagined, conceived and experienced in everyday life. Much has been written about how platformization of work contributes to maintaining and enhancing asymmetries and inequalities (Rosenblat, 2018) however less has been said about how these are in tension with digital learning processes and digital commons building (Fuster, 2014) on media platforms.
This paper contributes to the understanding of the platform work experience by analysing the process of training and learning, formal and informal, that allow platform workers to navigate opaque platform policies and logics (Chan, 2019) and to develop digital skills to potentially challenging everyday algorithmic management. In doing so we ethnographically surface the ties between workers' social media activities, expectations of social and economic progress and managers/ last-mile workers relation. We situate shared media imaginaries of technological work at the centre of this constellation.
To develop this we draw on interdisciplinary ethnographic research, between anthropology and communications studies, about platform workers' digital learning. We focus on delivery services, specifically on riders and robotized warehouses workers., in three cities: Madrid, Barcelona in Spain and Melbourne in Australia.