Digital Geography and Society最新文献

The rise of platform capitalism has been instrumental in facilitating capital accumulation at scale through the commodification of previously untradable services and spaces. Digital real estate technology-based platforms or ‘PropTech’ (Property Technology) have transformed how housing is produced, traded, and managed, augmenting existing and creating new housing markets in ways that are still evolving. While ‘home-sharing’ platform Airbnb has become synonymous with ‘peers’ offering residential accommodation online, more traditional forms of house sharing between ‘flat mates’ have also been digitised by global platforms. In this paper we trace the evolution of Australian share housing platform ‘Flatmates.com.au’ from the online equivalent of a campus noticeboard advertising share houses to a sophisticated real estate platform owned by global, PropTech giant Real Estate Advertising ‘REA Group’. In doing so we examine how ‘platform logic’ i.e., converting user-inputted data to information to asset; exponential growth through network expansion and connectivity – has integrated the social practices and relationships defining share households within the global real estate market. The paper contributes to critical literature on the inter-relationships between platform capitalism and housing, focusing specifically on the share housing sector in Australian cities.

Forest monitoring programs have become widespread in Amazon Basin countries. Using GPS artifacts, smartphones, drones, and other technologies, international environmental non-government organizations (IENGOs) propose these programs as tools to control and stop deforestation events—and thus of climate change mitigation. These also seem like ideal initiatives for IENGOs to collaborate with Indigenous organizations, responding to calls to include their knowledge in climate governance. I analyze forest/territorial monitoring programs created by the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) and its member organizations in Ecuador and Peru. Scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and digital geographies has demonstrated how digital environmental technologies and environmental relations and politics can co-produce and shape one another. It has also referred to the historically exploitative relationships that technoscientific projects have enforced towards Indigenous peoples, and the potential of digital tools for emancipatory goals. I argue that forest monitoring programs and technologies co-produce forms of climate and territorial politics in Amazonia. Through forest monitoring programs, Indigenous leaders and organizations imagine and enact territorial defense, or a politics founded on integral territorial ontologies. That is, they see the programs as tools to strengthen their autonomy, to build the capacities of leaders at all scales of political organization, and to support their claims for territorial rights. For them, technologies can make Indigenous cosmovisions or ancestral knowledges visible. However, these programs can also reinforce a politics (of IENGOs) where territories are spaces with strict boundaries and exclusive rights, and which encourages open-access information, thus potentially threatening Indigenous autonomy. Thus, I discuss the intrinsically contradictory impact of monitoring technologies, as the conceptions of territories as lifeworlds, and the embeddedness of ancestral knowledges in them, further exceed their possibilities. Conclusions highlight the importance of attending to Indigenous territorial defense to understand how (new) technologies and society shape each other, and the many implications of climate change responses to justice issues.

This work offers a reflection on children's caring practices as participants of digital fieldwork. I interrogate and illustrate how children might offer a different appreciation of care as a practice in digitally-mediated research. Examining digitally-mediated research with children participants reveals invisible caring expressions during the research process as doing digital fields is complex, overlooking various aspects of care throughout the research process. I propose a paucity to appreciate children's caring practices amidst the uncertainty of digital fieldwork and refresh our cherishing of such agency amidst thinking. Through video calls with slum-dwelling Filipino children (9–12 years old), I narrate how children demonstrated their versions of caring practices. Findings discuss: 1) The audio-visual experience and children's curiosity and criticisms; 2) Children's creative caring practices through symbolic expressions; and 3) negotiated transnational care through digitally-mediated research. This paper emphasises that caring through the digital platforms is a multi-layered practice that is not only demonstrated by adults but also enacted by children in their own means. This study invites further engagement on digital children's geographies in disentangling children's roles in digitally-mediated research.

The values people ascribe to their interactions with and within the environment are essential to inform justice and sustainability transformations. The development of many of these values unfolds through enjoying so-called cultural ecosystem services (CES) such as outdoor recreation, landscape aesthetics or environmental education. A growing body of literature is improving the assessment of the multiple ways that people value human and non-human relations arising when enjoying CES. Yet, the geo-temporal-demographic patterns of values distribution and the lessons that can be derived are to be consistently analysed within this relational framework. Building on a visual and textual content analysis of social media (SM) data geotagged in a peri-urban park of Barcelona, Spain, this research explores the potential of analysing the associated metadata (such as geotag, timestamp and social media users' demographics – i.e., performed gender and residency) in order to develop a better understanding of the linkages between people's values and the situated context of their construction. Our results show trends in relational CES values distribution along and between the analysed spatial, temporal, and demographic dimensions. In particular, despite there being a multiplicity of values revealed across the whole case-study area, to enjoy contemplative CES, such as spiritual or cognitive value, people need to move away from highly frequented areas and prefer specific times of the day, respectively evening or afternoon. Locals show a higher preference to visit the park on weekends compared to non-locals, while women-performing users show a significantly higher drop in their CES benefits uptake compared to men-performing users at night. In addition to providing novel and fine-grained information for transformative practices toward justice and sustainability, this study highlights the importance of complementing CES studies employing SM with metadata analysis to improve our understanding of the relationship between the real and the more-than-real.

Platform labour has established itself as a new form of work in recent years. The platforms themselves advertise the flexibility and freedom of being an independent contractor as beneficial characteristics of their working arrangements. However, existing studies show that these promises do not always correspond to workers' lived experiences. While manifold research discusses the often precarious working conditions of established platform workers, less is known about gaining access to gig work in the first place. This paper draws attention to onboarding processes in the place-based gig economy. From a feminist geography perspective and building on geographies of affect, this paper analyses the process of getting a first paid gig, focusing on how emotions shape platform workers' daily lives. Through autoethnography, I reflect on my own experiences of trying to establish myself as paid platform worker. Contrary to common assumptions, I argue that access to the place-based gig economy is not necessarily straightforward. The paper shows how the labour mediation processes implemented by the platforms create in- and exclusions from the beginning. By letting the workers chase a first gig, the platform capitalises on extended unpaid labour, which is key in maintaining the value production in the gig economy itself.

This paper aims to make sense of Miss Costa, a female white shark with a Twitter account. In 2016, she was captured, tagged and released off of Nantucket, Massachusetts by a relatively new non-profit organization called OCEARCH. OCEARCH named Miss Costa after a corporate sponsor (Costa sunglasses) and created a Twitter account under her name. Today, @MissCostaShark has over 18,000 followers and tweets regularly. Tweets often include screenshots of maps showing where Miss Costa has recently been in the ocean, information that is available because OCEARCH fitted her with acoustic, accelerometer, and ‘smart position and temperature transmitting’ (SPOT) tags. Throughout the paper we trace and critically consider practices of following Miss Costa, from researchers and environmentalists that seek to catch, tag and test her, to digital storytellers and other media purveyors that want to photograph, record and ‘share’ her virtually; to online audiences who watch her movements and like and retweet ‘her’ stories, experiences and opinions. We argue that the novel and specific combination of digital technologies and practices used by OCEARCH (animal tracking and social media) constructs Miss Costa as a form of digital nature that is individualized and spectacularized. The resulting effects on shark science, ocean conservation and human audiences are far from straight forward and demand critical attention.

Because of its relatively well-developed, highly urbanised economy and high penetration of mobile internet access, the platform economy took off quickly in South Africa, with international players vying for market share and local platforms pursuing more innovative approaches. Digital labour platforms have offered new earning opportunities to many in the country, but concerns have been raised about the quality of jobs created, and whether they meet standards of decent work. South Africa was one of the pilot countries for the Fairwork Project. This article describes the specific conditions which supported the take-off of location-based digital labour platforms in South Africa, explains the methodology used for pursuing the Fairwork research, discusses ratings outcomes based on the empirical research and summarizes the action research component of the project—with particular attention paid to outcomes for workers. We also list some of the lessons that were learnt and give a critical reflection on the project in the hope of assisting other researchers investigating the fourth industrial revolution, the gig economy, and decent work standards, especially in the Global South.

While there is growing literature regarding the impact of the gig economy in countries of the Global North, the way it operates in Latin America and the Caribbean remains underexplored. This article describes platform work in Chile, especially in the context of COVID-19, which has highlighted the essential role of geographically tethered digital platforms in facilitating essential goods and services in times of social distancing and quarantine. While the gig economy has provided employment for those outside traditional labor markets, its supposedly ‘collaborative’ employment structures obscure the different costs of precarity and informality transferred from platforms to workers (Ravenelle, 2019). Based on 35 interviews with gig workers using the Fairwork framework to evaluate working conditions in the gig economy, this article examines digital labor relations, both on paper and in reality; the conditions and limitations gig workers face daily; and their perceptions regarding such platforms. We discuss the contradictory experiences felt by platform workers, dependent on the platform in some ways, and independent in others. We argue that the inherently contradictory conditions and circumstances of platform work have become even more salient for gig workers in the context of COVID-19: risks increasingly fall on workers as platforms continue to stress their ‘choice’ to do so. This article reveals that the nature of the linkage between platform and worker is eminently a labor relationship, with clearly established elements of worker dependence.

Digitalization is profoundly impacting natural resource extraction. Mines and wells are monitored and managed in new ways from real-time data streams to algorithmic decision-making to implementation of automated vehicles. How mines and wells are superintended is restructuring the geographies of employment as more of the day-to-day mining operations are centralized in urban locations distant from sites of extraction. Digital infrastructures allow for greater control over distant non-urban extractive geographies, but they also are remaking urban spaces. While the tendency today is to create ever more geographically extensive extractive-labor regimes, these regimes are increasingly modulated by digital technology advances, a feature that also central in the drive for cities to become “smart.”

Here, in a review of the literature, we theorize these transformations and show that they raise pressing new research questions at the (digitalized) nexus of urban — carbon — labor. We argue that to date, research, particularly that on digitalization, has at any time tended to focus on two of the three nodes in this nexus, and better integrating all 3 of them raises unique theoretical challenges. We offer 4 inquiries as an agenda that can guide future research. First, how should urban labor be brought to bear on digital extraction scholarship? Second, how is digitalization of carbon-extractive economies shaping social divisions of labor in the smart city? Third, does the datafication of “nature” in energy-extractive industries transform political ecology relations? Fourth, how does the particular context of the extractive industries make us rethink urban economies of digital labor?

Under digital capitalism, the interests of landed property and digital platforms are converging. This article explores this dynamic in rental homes operated by corporate landlords by querying how private equity, pension funds and other institutional investors mobilise renters’ personal data to extract value from their assets. This article argues that as corporate landlords embrace the logics of rentier platforms, data offers a new frontier of accumulation. ‘Double threat’ enclosure describes how the traditional material enclosure of real property and extraction of monetary rents combines with the digital enclosure of renter subjects and extraction of data rents to drive returns on rental investments. To make this argument, I dissect the corporate landlord as a rentier platform. This dissection foregrounds its digital infrastructures, data as the lifeblood of platforms, and datafication as the process of mobilising data to capture data rents. Build to rent (multifamily) provides a compelling case study as a growing global asset class. I show how corporate landlords compile sophisticated renter profiles, convert renter data into ‘operational metrics’, and leverage recursive feedback to drive operational efficiencies in asset management. Double threat enclosure effectively revises tenant/landlords relations in its attempts to: (1) transform renters into techno-economic objects (assets) increasingly legible only in these terms; (2) score, sort and stratify renters based on asset management imperatives of operational efficiency; (3) monitor, discipline and monetise renters with unprecedented intensity; and (4) exclude and invisibilise those who are unviable techno-economic objects. Double threat enclosure, with its new digital tools and sites (ie. renters; tech stacks) of accumulation, augments the financialization of housing and exacerbates risks to renters. The ramping up of private control over (data about) city residents/renters, expands concerns to include the way rental homes risks becoming a foothold for exercising power, not just extracting rents.