{"title":"Connected, programmed, and immobilised: a mobile ethnography of platform-mediated food delivery in Seoul","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2327845","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Against the rise of mobility platforms, this paper explores the practices and politics of mobility arising from the everyday infrastructural functioning of Baemin, the largest food delivery platform in South Korea. While the literature on food delivery platforms centres on changing labour relations, platform workers do not merely represent a new type of labour; they likewise form a critical conduit in the urban logistics system. Platform-mediated food delivery can be therefore conceptualised as a moving assemblage of heterogeneous entities that constitutes an urban infrastructure. Having emerged as an urban mobility regime, food delivery platforms increasingly enact a form of governance, enabling a particular mode of circulation and movements. Engaging with the mobility framework, combined with critical infrastructure scholarship, this paper seeks to uncover the politics of im/mobility involved in the creation of a ceaselessly flowing city envisaged by Baemin. It identifies three forms of mobilities—connected, programmed, and immobilised—produced through contingent interactions between moving bodies, technologies, and the environment, which could amount to tethering effects. Integrating empirical materials from multimethod mobile ethnography in Seoul, it presents on-the-ground accounts of practices, interactions, and sensations gathered around the Baemin-mediated food delivery.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"19 4","pages":"Pages 573-592"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Mobilities","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S1745010124000134","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"GEOGRAPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Against the rise of mobility platforms, this paper explores the practices and politics of mobility arising from the everyday infrastructural functioning of Baemin, the largest food delivery platform in South Korea. While the literature on food delivery platforms centres on changing labour relations, platform workers do not merely represent a new type of labour; they likewise form a critical conduit in the urban logistics system. Platform-mediated food delivery can be therefore conceptualised as a moving assemblage of heterogeneous entities that constitutes an urban infrastructure. Having emerged as an urban mobility regime, food delivery platforms increasingly enact a form of governance, enabling a particular mode of circulation and movements. Engaging with the mobility framework, combined with critical infrastructure scholarship, this paper seeks to uncover the politics of im/mobility involved in the creation of a ceaselessly flowing city envisaged by Baemin. It identifies three forms of mobilities—connected, programmed, and immobilised—produced through contingent interactions between moving bodies, technologies, and the environment, which could amount to tethering effects. Integrating empirical materials from multimethod mobile ethnography in Seoul, it presents on-the-ground accounts of practices, interactions, and sensations gathered around the Baemin-mediated food delivery.
期刊介绍:
Mobilities examines both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public and private spaces, and the travel of material things in everyday life. Recent developments in transportation and communications infrastructures, along with new social and cultural practices of mobility, present new challenges for the coordination and governance of mobilities and for the protection of mobility rights and access. This has elicited many new research methods and theories relevant for understanding the connections between diverse mobilities and immobilities.