The article examines the role of social media groups for online freelance workers in the Philippines—digital workers obtaining “gigs” from online labor platforms such as Upwork and Onlinejobs.ph—for social facilitation and collective organizing. The article first problematizes labor marginality in the context of online freelance platform workers situated in the middle of competing narratives of precarity and opportunity. We then examine unique forms of solidarity emerging from social media groups formed by these geographically spread digital workers. Drawing from participant observation in online freelance Facebook groups, as well as interviews and focus groups with 31 online freelance workers located in the cities of Manila, Cebu, and Davao, we found that online Filipino freelancers maintain active social interaction and exchange that can be construed as “entrepreneurial solidarities.” These solidarities are characterized by competing discourses of ambiguity, precarity, opportunity, and adaptation that are articulated and visualized through ambient socialities. While we argue that these entrepreneurial solidarities do not reflect a passive and simplistic acceptance of neoliberal discourses about digital labor by digital workers, the solidarities forged in these groups also work to undermine their resistive potential such that these tend to reinforce rather than impose pressure toward critical structural changes that can improve the viability of digital labor conditions.

Applying the ‘Rural Livelihoods’ framework of analysis, this study explores the link between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and rural poverty reduction by analyzing the role of community telecenters in enhancing the livelihood strategies of rural poor households. The ‘Rural Livelihoods’ framework argues that interventions that play a role in facilitating an increase in the poor's livelihood assets and resources and facilitate diversified livelihoods have a potential for reducing poverty. Using telecenters set up by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the China Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) in selected rural villages in Wu'an, China as case studies, the paper explores the direct and indirect role that telecenters play in facilitating the poor's access to more livelihood resources and assets and in influencing the adoption of diverse livelihood strategies. Findings show that while the intensity of the changes experienced cannot support the claims about the transformative role of telecenters on the rural poor, these have some positive implications on certain aspects of rural poverty. These implications extend not only to economic aspects (such as better earnings or production), but to human (such as e‐literacy and new farming techniques) and social (such as creation of venues for community integration and knowledge sharing) dimensions. The paper gives emphasis on specific conditions and factors that motivate rural communities to use telecenter facilities and obtain useful information, and those that facilitate the translation of information into the construction of diversified livelihood strategies.

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This paper attempts to avoid both overly optimistic and pessimistic accounts of the ‘on-demand’ global economy and of ‘platform labor’ in the Global South. It instead considers both how the socio-cultural and economic complexities of the worker environment might drive the attractiveness of this form of labor and how histories of colonialism might make local employment and upward mobility less of a viable option for workers from the Global South. Drawing from in-depth interviews and analysis of multiple texts circulating in online freelance forums, Facebook groups, and ‘freelancer’ events, we look at how freelance workers and platform managers enacted and articulated classed and colonial digital labor imaginaries. We identify three such interconnected imaginaries and label them as follows: that of ‘distinction,’ ‘transcendence,’ and ‘flexibility’. In fleshing out these digital labor imaginaries, we discuss the role of virtual spaces, online communities, and the influencers who help push these imaginaries within the digital platform. And in exploring digital labor in the context of its socio-political and cultural embeddedness, we aim to show how workers constituted a sense of self and agency while being embedded in aspirations that were fraught at best and false at worst.

The open science (OS) movement has advocated for increased transparency in certain aspects of research. Communication is taking its first steps toward OS as some journals have adopted OS guidelines codified by another discipline. We find this pursuit troubling as OS prioritizes openness while insufficiently addressing essential ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Some recommended open science practices increase the potential for harm for marginalized participants, communities, and researchers. We elaborate how OS can serve a marginalizing force within academia and the research community, as it overlooks the needs of marginalized scholars and excludes some forms of scholarship. We challenge the current instantiation of OS and propose a divergent agenda for the future of Communication research centered on ethical, inclusive research practices.

This article interrogates political brokerage on YouTube by examining the platform’s role in the construction of political discourses and in configuring the action of a new genre of political actors advancing a political agenda through historical revisionism. Using assemblage theory and drawing from technography, we propose the concept of “networked political brokerage” to characterize the mutually affirming relationship of YouTube’s governance mechanisms and alternative political influencers’ microcelebrity practices in building, complementing, and magnifying historical revisionist narratives through and within a network of algorithmically sanctioned videos. We illustrate how this interplay of platform logics and ‘cultures of use' privileges and legitimizes political content into knowledge without accountability. We argue for the importance of examining YouTube as a socio-technical driver of this political brokerage process in curating political information in this contemporary political scene.

Hegemonic Open Science, emergent from the circuits of knowledge production in the Global North and serving the economic interests of platform capitalism, systematically erase the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North. Framed within an overarching emancipatory narrative of creating access for and empowering the margins through data exchanged on the global free market, hegemonic Open Science processes co-opt and erase Southern epistemologies, working to create and reproduce new enclosures of extraction that serve data colonialism-capitalism. In this essay, drawing on our ongoing negotiations of community-led culture-centered advocacy and activist strategies that resist the racist, gendered, and classed structures of neocolonial knowledge production in the metropole in the North, we attend to Southern practices of Openness that radically disrupt the whiteness of hegemonic Open Science. These decolonizing practices foreground data sovereignty, community ownership, and public ownership of knowledge resources as the bases of resistance to the colonial-capitalist interests of hegemonic Open Science.