social media | Platypus

Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi

 Sarah Zia  July 18, 2019

*A note from Co-PI Noopur Raval: The arrival and rise of gig-work globally has ushered in a new wave of conversations around the casualization of labor and the precarious nature of digitally-mediated “gigs,” ranging from online crowdwork gigs to digitally-mediated physical work such as Ubering. Gradually, scholarship has extended beyond North America and Europe to map the landscape of digital labor in the global south. These posts that make up “India’s Gig-Work Economy” are the result of one such project titled ‘Mapping Digital Labour in India,’ where four research fellows and a program manager, me, have been studying the dynamics of app-based ridehailing and food-delivery work in two Indian cities (Mumbai and New Delhi). This project is supported by the Azim Premji University’s Research Grants program. In this series of posts, the research fellows and I offer reflections on pleasure, surveillance, morality and other aspects woven into the sociality of gig-work and consumption in India. Each post also has an accompanying audio piece in an Indian language, in a bid to reach out to non-academic and non-English speaking audiences. The series ends with a roundtable discussion post on the challenges, gender and class dynamics, and ethics of researching gig-work(ers) in India.* Download a transcript of the audio in Devanagari. Ride-hailing platforms such as Olacabs and Uber have “disrupted” public transport in India since their arrival. It has been almost seven years since app-based ride-hailing became a permanent feature of urban and peri-urban India with these aggregators operating in over a 100 Indian cities now. Akin to the global story, much has happened – there was a period of boom and novelty for passengers and drivers, then incentives fell. Ride-hailing work has become increasingly demanding with reduced payouts. But what hasn’t received enough attention (especially outside the US) is how these platforms create a deliberate regime of information invisibility and control to keep the drivers constantly on their toes which works to the companies’ advantage. What then are the implications of this uncertainty, which is fueled by app design as well as by the companies’ decision that drivers need little or no information about users? How does service delivery operate in a context where those actually delivering it have little or no idea about the workings of the system? (read more...)

Anti-Queer Violence, Bearing Witness, and Thinking with Algorithms on Social Media

 Baird Campbell  June 27, 2019

Esta publicación está disponible en español aquí.

In early June 2019, news began to break concerning the death of a Salvadoran transgender woman, Johana Medina León, of pneumonia, four days after being released from nearly six weeks in ICE custody. Before long, my Facebook feed was filled with stories detailing the persecution Johana faced in El Salvador because of her gender identity; her dangerous journey to the United States to seek asylum; and her final moments as she struggled to save her own life, as it became clear no one else would. She might have saved her own life, if she’d been given the resources. In El Salvador, Johana was a nurse. Johana’s death is tragic for many reasons, not the least of which is that had it not been for social media, it likely would have gone unnoticed. (read more...)

Happy Pride Month!

 Baird Campbell  June 18, 2019

In support and solidarity with LGBTQIA+/Queer people around the world, we’re celebrating Pride Month with a collection of some of our most popular queer content from the blog. We take this moment to recognize the valuable contributions LGBTQIA+/Queer people make to our fields, our society, and our lives. Check out six of our favorites below! (read more...)

Towards a Queer Art of Surveillance in South Korea

 Timothy Gitzen  March 12, 2019

When is a face not a face? With the launch of the iPhone X that boasts facial recognition capabilities, the individual markers of one’s face tie one’s identity to the security of their phone. Yet it also makes the face complicit in forms of self-surveillance, as it requires definitive facial proof to access one’s phone. It produces the face as evidence of one’s identity that supposedly cannot be forged. In this instance, one continuously uses one’s phone to surveil one’s own identity—with the face becoming a safeguard against potential security breaches. Small-scale, yes, but surveillance need not always be connected to sprawling security apparatuses and institutions. So we ask again: when is a face not a face? When it is used to distinguish a body as a body rather than as an individuated person? With this post, we seek to explore possible answers to this question in the context of South Korea, by focusing on the role of self-surveillance in the politics of queer student activist organizations. (read more...)

Parrotfish: The Charisma of Conservation in the Caribbean

 Kyrstin Mallon Andrews  May 8, 2018

During the week of Easter, the beaches of the Dominican Republic were converted into billboards for the campaign to stop the consumption of parrotfish. Pictures taken from drones showed brilliant blues of the ocean bordered by the characteristic white sands of beaches throughout the country. Spelled out on the sand were calls for help. The messages, “Save me, don’t eat parrotfish,” “If you eat parrotfish, I disappear,” “If you eat parrotfish, you eat away my sand,” and “SOS: parrotfish,” were each followed by the hashtag #lasplayashablan: the beaches speak. (read more...)

What do Japanese Internet Trolls think of Trump?

 Elizabeth Rodwell  November 21, 2017

It’s hard not to think about Trump in Japan without one eye cast warily on North Korea. After all, it was only about two months ago that North Korea sent a ballistic missile sailing over Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido, prompting fears that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un might target the U.S.’s nearby ally. As wary as many Americans are of Trump’s using Twitter to relentlessly bait Kim Jong Un, the matter is perceived with greater reservation by many in Japan. Kim Jong Un’s volatility is by no means news in East Asia, and a common fear holds that the American folly of electing Trump could cost Japan more than it has the U.S. (read more...)

Locating Servers, Locating Politics

 Evan Conaway  October 17, 2017

When we think of servers, like web servers and Amazon servers, we don’t usually think of them as occupying physical space. We might think of a remote data center, thanks in large part to images that have been circulated by companies like Facebook and Google. But still, these only visualize unmarked buildings and warehouse rooms, showcasing a particular tech aesthetic of colored wires and tubes, and neatly assembled rows of blinking machines (Holt and Vondereau 2015). Such imagery is hardly meant to provide the public with a sense of where servers are actually located. For most day-to-day computer users, it often doesn’t matter at all whether servers are in the U.S. or China or Russia, so long as they work. But server location matters, and many groups of people value certain material benefits and effects of the placement of servers and their own proximity to servers. It matters for online (read more...)