Virtually Absent: The Gendered Histories and Economies of Digital Labour

Abstract

Digital labour refers to a range of tasks performed by humans on, in relation to or in the aftermath of software and hardware platforms. On-demand logistics services like Uber and Deliveroo, micro-work venues such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, data transactions generated by social media channels and online retail portals devoted to one-click consumption all comprise digital labour. So do the maledominated workplaces of high-tech firms with long hours and oblique Human Resources policies in an era of #MeToo revelations. Digital labour is intrinsically bound to physical space and to hardware, even when it is classified as 'immaterial' in nature (Fortunati, 2018). Very few workplaces now exist without dependency on the mobile devices, computer sensors and data servers upon which software operates. Feminist scholars have successfully highlighted the role women play in the front line of technology assembly (Pun, 2005; Nakamura, 2014) as well as computer science and programming (Hicks, 2018). Underpaid female and migrant labour, some of it located in electronics assembly plants in East Asia and Eastern Europe, is the labour that powers the internet and its necessary hardware (Sacchetto and Andrijasevic, 2015). Inhumane working conditions and the pressure of untenable production speeds in manufacturing became visible in 2010 when fourteen workers at Foxconn, the main assembler for Apple located in mainland China, committed suicide. Since then, more workers at Foxconn have 'jumped' to their deaths and thousands of others have protested their plight via work stoppages, wildcat strikes and organised mobilisations (Qiu, 2016). Next to this vast army of underpaid offshore workers, 'free labour' is the defining feature of the digital economy (Terranova, 2000). In the early days, volunteer moderators in the USA engaged by America Online spent thousands of hours making the internet 'safe' by investigating complaints and grievances and keeping harassment and abuse in check (Postigo, 2009). Today such work continues, largely uncompensated, with women of colour, queer and trans people joining other minority activists to moderate online interactions and call out a constant stream of sexist and misogynist content (Nakamura, 2015; Roberts, 2019). Even workplaces that functionally rely on moderation work do so with the help of 878929F ER0010.

The disconnection turn: Three facets of disconnective work in post-digital capitalism

“…The kind of everyday digital work that contemporary livelihoods require has been conceptualized as, for example, "digital housekeeping" (Kennedy et al, 2015), "the invisible work of flexibility" (Whiting and Symon, 2020), "digital mundane work" (Wilson and Yochim, 2017), "online boundary work" (Siegert and Löwstedt, 2019), and "transcendent parenting" (Lim, 2019). Though these concepts are not directly interchangeable, they all point to work tasks which-like older forms of reproductive housework (Gregg and Andrijasevic, 2019;Jarrett, 2014)-are vital for the management of daily life and to capitalist value creation. Following this strand of studies, I here look for disconnective work outside of the formal wage market.…”

“…By treating disconnection as a matter of work, the article in effect bridges two distinct "turns" in media studies: the already commentated disconnection turn and what elsewhere has been labeled the "labour turn" (De Peuter and Cohen, 2015: 312). The latter, which encompasses "non-essentialist" and "non-normative" categorizations of work (Richardson, 2018), teaches us that we need to accept as work or labour a range of mundane media-induced activities (e.g., Fuchs, 2014;Jarrett, 2016;Gandini, 2021;Gregg and Andrijasevic, 2019;Scholz, 2012).…”

Gender Relations at the Digitalised Workplace: The Interrelation Between Digitalisation, Gender, and Work

“…Existing feminist theoretical analyses of digital labour often focus primarily on the incorporation of immaterial labour into the market (Gregg, Andrijasevic 2019;Huws 2019;Jarrett 2014Jarrett , 2016. However, this is a theoretical shortcoming since the digitalisation of work affects gender inequalities on several levels and in multiple fields.…”

“Alexa, are you a feminist?”: Virtual Assistants Doing Gender and What That Means for the World

“…With tens of millions of Alexas installed, she has quickly become greater than the sum of her parts: she creates grocery lists, answers math questions, tells the weather, sets timers, and can even entertain your children (Shulevitz, 2018). Gregg and Andrijasevic (2019) explain that digital labour, as performed by Alexa, is "bound to physical space and hardware" (p.1), despite her existence in the cloud and her lack of a (threatening) female body. iJournal, Vol 6, No.…”