Digital Geography and Society最新文献

Echoing the ‘follow the thing’ approach, this article provides a methodological thought on doing everyday geographies of the digital, based on my research experiences of undertaking the fieldwork of the project Curating Digital Lives over the past few years. This research considers the digital as a followable thing embedded in everyday spaces and practices. It develops a ‘follow the digital’ methodology that attunes us to the contingent, unpredictable, and uncertain routines and processes in which geographical networks are framed by human and non-human actors. This methodology can help geographers to nuance our understanding of the roles of the digital in producing geographical knowledge from the below. Inspired by the recent digital turn, this article also wants to open a dialogue on collaborating with new research technologies.

In the context of extreme societal polarization, activists have mobilized to protest injustices and claim their rights, yet such efforts often fall short of goals because demands normally are directed to government or firms that offer superficial responses. Communitarianism, which broadly strives for autonomy from established institutions, promises the development of self-provisioning communities based on cooperative networks and participatory, democratic governance that prioritizes use over exchange value and redistribution over profitable activity for individuals. The emergence of Web3 and blockchain technology has ushered in new affordances such as scaling a communitarian enterprise and exchange of value independent of banks or other institutions. Whereas market-based organizations use Web 3 affordances for accounting purposes for profit, communitarian organizations aim to link accounting with designs to inject capital into a commons to support self-governing communities in community-based peer production (CBPP). To exemplify the broad range of approaches to the multifaceted goals of CBPP, I focus on FairCoop and Sensorica. Despite considerable differences, these organizations nonetheless share problems and generally are illustrative of longstanding challenges to communitarian enterprises – digitalized and non-digitalized alike. Perennial problems such as the fraught capitalist/postcapitalist relation, self-interest, uneven power relations, lack of diversity, and the challenge of responding adequately to societal needs combine with effects of automated governance and associated effects of technocracy that can dissolve founding values to threaten the integrity of a communitarian collective. CBPP as well as its non-digitalized counterparts are important contributions to humanity, but goals and actual practices can diverge. CBPP requires vigilant designs that complement rather than replace human decision making with algorithmic governance and pay attention to reflexivity and positionality, continual re-design to engage unanticipated problems, and distancing actually existing projects from discourses that reify patterns such as decentralization with the consequence of missing crucial contextual knowledges.

In Summer 2020, young workers from prominent Vancouver, British Columbia-based cafes, restaurants and breweries took to Instagram to air grievances about their workplaces. Precarious and violent working conditions in the food industry are business as usual in BC, which is reflected in the stories these workers shared of wage theft, unsafe workplaces, erratic scheduling, harassment and sexual violence. Held within the context of widespread layoffs in the industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these workers built communities of complaint and, in some cases, fundamentally changed the ownership and operations of their workplaces. To do this, these young workers navigated a complex web of digital/physical spaces and relationships to challenge abuses in their workplaces. By centering their complaints in the interrelationship between complaint, digital political protest, economic grievance and known forms of worker organizing, this paper explores how young people leveraged their grievances through their digital networks to influence their economic relationships and create safer workplaces for themselves and other workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the prevalence of mental health issues across the U.S. While therapists have been able to shift to telehealth delivery of mental healthcare, there has been a recent increase in the number of therapists on social media. Social media as a site of engagement has been feared by systems of power which regulate the ethics of therapists, and despite the influx of therapists online, these ethical guidelines remain under researched. Feminist geographers have explored theories and practices of care within different spaces, and especially in the wake of the pandemic, there is a need to conceptualize how therapists provide care within digital spaces and how this affects the delivery of mental healthcare. This study sampled 100 videos on the social media site, TikTok, for a content analysis using the hashtag #therapistsoftiktok. The videos were analyzed to uncover themes relating to how therapists provided care to the viewer. Four themes emerged in the analysis and showed that therapists provided care both directly and indirectly to the viewers. Direct care included providing psychoeducation to the viewers and offering validations/affirmations. Indirect care included normalizing therapy and humanizing the therapist, and these videos were interpreted to focus more on relationship building and addressing viewers' anxieties about therapy and therapists, which may allow viewers to engage in therapy in the future. This study identified ways that therapists are engaging in care work digitally, despite the admonishments and warnings from professional therapy boards. Ethical concerns still abound, as intimacy and relationship-building can occur across digital spaces. However, rather than simply abstaining from social media, therapists are engaging in resistant and creative ways to provide care and destigmatize mental health issues to a global audience.

It has been argued that digital platform firms leverage their position at spatial bottlenecks in such a fashion so as to allow operations in local labour markets while at the same time insulating themselves from the regulatory provisions that govern those local markets. This is not necessarily a stable condition, but as long as platform firms exert power, they may shift the social relationships that platforms embody in their favour: domination trumps mutuality and autonomy. However, this does not have to be so. Depending on the context, opportunities for breaking out of this mould exist. Specifically, we focus on the institutional context provided by coordinated market economies to argue that, depending on pre-existing forms of cooperation, platforms can be designed and applied in a manner that enables the building and maintenance of trust through an emphasis on mutuality and autonomy rather than inevitably drifting towards the pole of domination. Using the example of the hospitality industry and focusing on training and certification in geographically fragmented labour markets, we set out to explore the possible role of the institutional setting in shaping platform use as recruitment needs are to be resolved.

The evolution of the collaborative economy depends on market-specific prerequisites, such as a consumer base with purchasing power, accessible Internet connectivity, digitised payment mechanisms and new regulatory frameworks. However, countries located in the Global South, such as Ecuador, face challenges in adapting to these requirements due to the presence of infrastructure deficiencies, shortcomings in the local financial ecosystem and regulatory gaps, which impede the maturation of digital industries. However, the unprecedented global economic upheaval stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the imposition of international lockdowns and social distancing mandates, has precipitated the unbridled proliferation of digital platforms and the gig economy. In this unregulated environment, platform workers face intricate labour rights dynamics, marked by income volatility, scarce benefits and an environment rife with precarity and exploitative conditions.

This paper aims to answer how the gig economy was installed and developed in Ecuador before and during the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. More specifically, we will try to answer the question of what have been the main challenges and barriers faced by platform workers and platforms in adhering to Fairwork principles in an unregulated context. Based on more than seventy semi-structured interviews and ethnographic material collected between 2020 and 2021, we provide an overview of Ecuador's gig economy and an in-depth examination of the institutional, regulatory, and organisational landscape characterising this country in order to identify the main challenges and obstacles to establishing and enforcing fair work standards. This analysis helped us understand the difficulties in implementing Fairwork principles and come up with practical suggestions for policy and regulation improvements in Ecuador and similar situations.

The growing literature on housing financialisation and particularly the financialisation of private rental sector residential housing offers nuanced analysis of how international financial actors increasingly shape housing markets and systems across the globe. Drawing inspiration from Maalsen’s (2022) work on the hack, this paper suggests that corporate landlord investment in the private rental sector can be understood as a process of disruptive consolidation. Disruptive consolidation is introduced as a useful conceptual lens for connecting a) the disrupted urban contexts which institutional investors target for speculation, b) the practices of consolidation that institutional investors pursue in establishing their portfolios as corporate landlords, and c) the ensuing disruptive impacts for housing policy, urban space, and tenants’ lives. While post-crash housing financialisation and the disruption of the private rental sector are often connected to the application of digital technologies to screen, surveille, and assetise tenants, I suggest that the digital/material dynamics of housing financialisation also afford ambivalent opportunities for both research and resistance. The paper applies a combination of desktop-based digital research methods to document how private rental sector consolidation has unfolded in Dublin and the role that the state has played in setting this dynamic in motion. I make use of digital research methods as a tactical appropriation of digital technologies to show how post-crash Dublin is an emblematic example of disruption through consolidation, demonstrating how this framework can be applied to connect urban and political economy approaches to housing and its financialisation. I conclude by briefly signposting how disruptive consolidation raises pressing questions for housing policy in Dublin and elsewhere.

This paper proposes and explores the idea of incidental governmentality. We argue that incidental governmentality offers a creative context to critically scrutinise the changing rationalities of government in the age of Big Tech and digital surveillance. Incidental governmentality exhibits the same pastoral character as biopolitics: as governmental power is realised through the provision of life affirming public goods and services including improved public health, financial security, and social connection. However, incidental governmentality is incidental to the extent that its governmental reasons are secondary to that of its corporate rationalities. This paper charts the historical origins of incidental forms governmentality and the value of applying this theoretical perspective to emerging governmental forms. Analysis outlines the nature and critical implications of incidental forms of governmentality and draws out its distinctions with corporate governmentality, corporate social responsibility, and algorithmic governmentality. This paper utilises the idea of incidental governmentality to make sense of the “governmental” interventions of Big-Tech companies such as Facebook and Google in response to COVID-19 in the UK. Through this case study analysis considers the processes that enabled the rapid mobilisation of Big Tech within public health initiatives and what this can tell us about the political and geographical implications of incidental governmentality.

Millions of workers are employed in Indonesia's gig economy, with evidence of both benefits and problems. This paper provides a first systematic collation of evidence using the five Fairwork principles of decent gig work. Based on data from interviews and secondary sources, it focuses on transportation-related gig work. It finds positives in terms of gross pay levels, action by platforms on work-related risks and harassment of women workers, and some recognition of some worker groups. But it also finds action needed on below-minimum-wage net earnings, long hours, lack of employee status and social protections for workers, inadequate processes for appeal of disciplinary decisions, and constraints on worker voice. The paper ends with recommendations for actions to be taken by government, platforms and consumers in Indonesia.

With the spread of digitalization, the spaces and imaginaries of healthcare are fundamentally changing, due, in part, to an increasing uptake of immersive technologies. Building on previous ethnographic work on the nature of placed care (Ivanova, 2020a; Simonsen, 2020) this paper explores two cases of immersive technology advances in the Netherlands and Denmark to better understand contemporary developments in digital healthcare, the virtual environments they afford, and the immersive experiences they seek to evoke. First, we offer ‘immersive imaginaries’ as a heuristic for exploring how ideas of immersion, placeless-ness, and futurity intersect as key stakeholders in the healthcare innovation industry articulate socio-technical solutions to healthcare problems, and to what effects. Second, and in drawing inspiration from feminist STS on care, we build on Ivanova's (2020b) conceptual work on ‘post place care’ to analyse the relations between place, technology, and care in experiences of immersion. These two points form the contribution of the paper and its ambition to engage with ongoing discussions in the field of digital geography about how to analyse and theorise digital spaces of care.