Paper short abstract:

Through the accounts of bicycle couriers gathered in online interviews, this paper explores how bicycle couriers working in the gig economy deploy their senses, especially sight and sound, as they seek to manage the volume, scheduling and intensity of their work.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how bicycle couriers working in the gig economy deploy their senses, especially sight and sound, as they seek to manage the volume, scheduling and intensity of their work. The platform or app they are bound up with induces different registers of rhythm from eurythmia to arrhythmia (in Lefebvre’s terms) as jobs fall into line or work is fragmented. Indeed, in the accounts of bicycle couriers gathered in online interviews, the operation of the app is felt as an augmentation of their senses and emerges as a digitalised extra-corporeal element of the nervous system. The vibration/notification of an order results in a habitual response from couriers. They hear the sound (of the possibility of work) and look at the screen. It demands a decision. This is a time-sensitive juncture, a moment of the couriers’ synchronisation with their platform(s). It tests their ability to decode the value of the opportunity and make a swift judgement: appraising the distance, direction, compensation and supplier, the effort required of the body against the rhythms of energy/fatigue… whilst always jostling with the chance that a better offer could arrive. Digital platforms embed uncertainty into the gig economy under the guise of flexibility, and so, the courier becomes a crisis connoisseur, negotiating between the digital and the analogue.