What Impact is the Gig Economy Having on Development and Worker Livelihoods?

by Mark Graham 20/03/2017

Reflecting on some of the key benefits and costs associated with these new digital regimes of work.

by Mark Graham 20/03/2017

There are imbalances in the relationship between supply and demand of digital work, with the vast majority of buyers located in high-income countries (pictured). See full article for details.

As David Harvey famously noted, workers are unavoidably place-based because “labour-power has to go home every night.” But the widespread use of the Internet has changed much of that. The confluence of rapidly spreading digital connectivity, skilled but under-employed workers, the existence of international markets for labour, and the ongoing search for new outsourcing destinations, has resulted in organisational, technological, and spatial fixes for virtual production networks of services and money. Clients, bosses, workers, and users of the end-products of work can all now be located in different corners of the planet. A new article by Mark Graham, Isis Hjorth and Vili Lehdonvirta, “Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods”, published in Transfer, discusses the implications of the spatial unfixing of work for workers in some of the world’s economic margins, and reflects on some of the key benefits and costs associated with these new digital regimes of work. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-east Asia, it highlights four key concerns for workers: bargaining power, economic inclusion, intermediated value chains, and upgrading. As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it is important to understand how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. The authors show that although there are important and tangible benefits for a range of workers, there are also a range of risks and costs that could negatively affect the livelihoods of digital workers. They conclude with a discussion of four broad strategies – certification schemes, organising digital workers, regulatory strategies and democratic control of online labour platforms—that could improve conditions and livelihoods for digital workers. We caught up with the authors to explore the implications of the study: Ed.: Shouldn’t increased digitisation of work also increase transparency (i.e. tracking,…

Interviews, Wellbeing

Tackling Digital Inequality: Why We Have to Think Bigger

by Huw Davies 15/03/2017

While the UK government has financed technological infrastructure and invested in schemes to address digital inequalities, the outcomes of these schemes are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved.

by Huw Davies 15/03/2017

Outcomes of the many schemes financed by the government to address digital inequalities are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved. Image: iPad by Sean MacEntee (Flickr).

Numerous academic studies have highlighted the significant differences in the ways that young people access, use and engage with the Internet and the implications it has in their lives. While the majority of young people have some form of access to the Internet, for some their connections are sporadic, dependent on credit on their phones, an available library, or Wi-Fi open to the public. Qualitative data in a variety of countries has shown such limited forms of access can create difficulties for these young people as an Internet connection becomes essential for socialising, accessing public services, saving money, and learning at school. While the UK government has financed technological infrastructure and invested in schemes to address digital inequalities, the outcomes of these schemes are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved. This gap between expectation and reality demands theoretical attention; with more attention placed on the cultural, political and economic contexts of the digitally excluded, and the various attempts to “include” them. Focusing on a two-year digital inclusion scheme for 30 teenagers and their families initiated by a local council in England, a qualitative study by Huw C. Davies, Rebecca Eynon, and Sarah Wilkin analyses why, despite the good intentions of the scheme’s stakeholders, it fell short of its ambitions. It also explains how the neoliberal systems of governance that are increasingly shaping the cultures and behaviours of Internet service providers and schools—that incentivise action that is counterproductive to addressing digital inequality and practices—cannot solve the problems they create. We caught up with the authors to discuss the study’s findings: Ed.: It was estimated that around 10% of 13 year olds in the study area lacked dependable access to the Internet, and had no laptop or PC at home. How does this impact educational outcomes? Huw: It’s impossible to disaggregate technology from everything else that can affect a young person’s progress through school. However, one school in our…

Ethics, Governance & Security, Wellbeing

Five Pieces You Should Probably Read On: Reality, Augmented Reality and Ambient Fun

by David Sutcliffe 03/03/2017

Things you should probably know, and things that deserve to be brought out for another viewing. This week: Reality, Augmented Reality and Ambient Fun!

by David Sutcliffe 03/03/2017

This is the third post in a series that will uncover great writing by faculty and students at the Oxford Internet Institute, things you should probably know, and things that deserve to be brought out for another viewing. This week: Reality, Augmented Reality and Ambient Fun! The addictive gameplay of Pokémon GO has led to police departments warning people that they should be more careful about revealing their locations, players injuring themselves, finding dead bodies, and even the Holocaust Museum telling people to play elsewhere. Our environments are increasingly augmented with digital information: but how do we assert our rights over how and where this information is used? And should we be paying more attention to the design of persuasive technologies in increasingly attention-scarce environments? Or should we maybe just bin all our devices and pack ourselves off to digital detox camp? 1. James Williams: Bring Your Own Boundaries: Pokémon GO and the Challenge of Ambient Fun 23 July 2016 | 2500 words | 12 min | Gross misuses of the “Poké-” prefix: 6 “The slogan of the Pokémon franchise is ‘Gotta catch ‘em all!’ This phrase has always seemed to me an apt slogan for the digital era as a whole. It expresses an important element of the attitude we’re expected to have as we grapple with the Sisyphean boulder of information abundance using our woefully insufficient cognitive toolsets.” Pokémon GO signals the first mainstream adoption of a type of game—always on, always with you—that requires you to ‘Bring Your Own Boundaries’, says James Williams. Regulation of the games falls on the user; presenting us with a unique opportunity to advance the conversation about the ethics of self-regulation and self-determination in environments of increasingly persuasive technology. 2. James Williams: Orwell, Huxley, Banksy 24 May 2014 | 1000 words | 5 min “Orwell worried that what we fear could ultimately come to control us: the “boot stamping on a human…

Ethics, Interviews, Wellbeing

Exploring the world of digital detoxing

by David Sutcliffe 02/03/2017

Advocates of “digital detoxing” view digital communication as eroding our ability to concentrate, to empathise, and to have meaningful conversations.

by David Sutcliffe 02/03/2017

The new (old) inbox. Camp Grounded tries to build up attendees’ confidence to be silly and playful, with their identities less tied to their work persona—in a backlash against Silicon Valley’s intense work ethic. Photo by Pumpernickle.

As our social interactions become increasingly entangled with the online world, there are some who insist on the benefits of disconnecting entirely from digital technology. These advocates of “digital detoxing” view digital communication as eroding our ability to concentrate, to empathise, and to have meaningful conversations. A 2016 survey by OnePoll found that 40% of respondents felt they had “not truly experienced valuable moments such as a child’s first steps or graduation” because “technology got in the way”, and OfCom’s 2016 survey showed that 15 million British Internet users (representing a third of those online), have already tried a digital detox. In recent years, America has sought to pathologise a perceived over-use of digital technology as “Internet addiction”. While the term is not recognised by the DSM, the idea is commonly used in media rhetoric and forms an important backdrop to digital detoxing. The article Disconnect to reconnect: The food/technology metaphor in digital detoxing (First Monday) by Theodora Sutton presents a short ethnography of the digital detoxing community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her informants attend an annual four-day digital detox and summer camp for adults in the Californian forest called Camp Grounded. She attended two Camp Grounded sessions in 2014, and followed up with semi-structured interviews with eight detoxers. We caught up with Theodora to examine the implications of the study and to learn more about her PhD research, which focuses on the same field site. Ed.: In your forthcoming article you say that Camp Grounded attendees used food metaphors (and words like “snacking” and “nutrition”) to understand their own use of technology and behaviour. How useful is this as an analogy? Theodora: The food/technology analogy is an incredibly neat way to talk about something we think of as immaterial in a more tangible way. We know that our digital world relies on physical connections, but we forget that all the time. Another thing it does in lending a dietary…

Interviews, Social Data Science, Wellbeing

Estimating the Local Geographies of Digital Inequality in Britain: London and the South East Show Highest Internet Use—But Why?

by David Sutcliffe 01/03/2017

Britain has one of the largest Internet economies in the developed world, and the Internet contributes an estimated 8.3 percent to Britain’s GDP.

by David Sutcliffe 01/03/2017

Despite the huge importance of the Internet in everyday life, we know surprisingly little about the geography of Internet use and participation at sub-national scales. A new article on Local Geographies of Digital Inequality by Grant Blank, Mark Graham, and Claudio Calvino published in Social Science Computer Review proposes a novel method to calculate the local geographies of Internet usage, employing Britain as an initial case study. In the first attempt to estimate Internet use at any small-scale level, they combine data from a sample survey, the 2013 Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS), with the 2011 UK census, employing small area estimation to estimate Internet use in small geographies in Britain. (Read the paper for more on this method, and discussion of why there has been little work on the geography of digital inequality.) There are two major reasons to suspect that geographic differences in Internet use may be important: apparent regional differences and the urban-rural divide. The authors do indeed find a regional difference: the area with least Internet use is in the North East, followed by central Wales; the highest is in London and the South East. But interestingly, geographic differences become non-significant after controlling for demographic variables (age, education, income etc.). That is, demographics matter more than simply where you live, in terms of the likelihood that you’re an Internet user. Britain has one of the largest Internet economies in the developed world, and the Internet contributes an estimated 8.3 percent to Britain’s GDP. By reducing a range of geographic frictions and allowing access to new customers, markets and ideas it strongly supports domestic job and income growth. There are also personal benefits to Internet use. However, these advantages are denied to people who are not online, leading to a stream of research on the so-called digital divide. We caught up with Grant Blank to discuss the policy implications of this marked disparity in (estimated) Internet use across…

Wellbeing

“If you’re on Twitter then you’re asking for it”—responses to sexual harassment online and offline

by admin 24/02/2017

Exploring what sorts of reactions people might have to examples of assault and how they might differ online and offline.

by admin 24/02/2017

Conversation between Laura Bates, Judy Wajcman (speaking) and Helen Margetts, at the Everyday Sexism Datahack, organised by the OII to encourage creative engagement with the textual data gathered by the Everyday Sexism project.

To encourage new ways of thinking about the problem of sexism in daily life, the OII’s recent Everyday Sexism Datahack brought together twenty people from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to analyse the written accounts of sexism and harassment gathered by the Everyday Sexism project. Founded by Laura Bates in 2012, Everyday Sexism has gathered more than 120,000 accounts submitted by members of the public. A research team at the OII has already been analysing the content, and provided cleaned data to the datahack participants that could be analysed through qualitative and quantitative methods. Following an introduction to the project by Laura Bates, an outline of the dataset by Taha Yasseri, and a speed-networking session led by Kathryn Eccles we fell into two teams to work with the data. Our own group wanted to examine the question of how people interact with the threat of public space. We were also interested in how public space is divided between online and offline, and the social perception of being online versus offline. We wanted to explore what sorts of reactions people might have to examples of assault, or strategies or things they might do in response to something happening to them—and how they might differ online and offline. We spent the first hour collecting keywords that might indicate reactions to either online or offline harassment, including identifying a perceived threat and coping with it. We then searched the raw data for responses like “I tried to ignore it,” “I felt safe/unsafe,” “I identified a risk,” “I was feeling worried, feeling anxious or nervous”; and also looked at online versus offline actions. So for online action we were looking for specific platforms being named, and people saying things like “comment, response, delete, remove” in relation to social media posts. For offline we were looking for things like “I carried a [specific item]” or “I hid or avoided certain areas“ or “I walked faster”…

Ethics, Politics & Government

Five Pieces You Should Probably Read On: Fake News and Filter Bubbles

by David Sutcliffe 27/01/2017

Do social media divide us, hide us from each other? Are you particularly aware of what content is personalised for you, what it is you’re not seeing?

by David Sutcliffe 27/01/2017

This is the second post in a series that will uncover great writing by faculty and students at the Oxford Internet Institute, things you should probably know, and things that deserve to be brought out for another viewing. This week: Fake News and Filter Bubbles! Fake news, post-truth, “alternative facts”, filter bubbles—this is the news and media environment we apparently now inhabit, and that has formed the fabric and backdrop of Brexit (“£350 million a week”) and Trump (“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period”). Do social media divide us, hide us from each other? Are you particularly aware of what content is personalised for you, what it is you’re not seeing? How much can we do with machine-automated or crowd-sourced verification of facts? And are things really any worse now than when Bacon complained in 1620 about the false notions that “are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein”? 1. Bernie Hogan: How Facebook divides us [Times Literary Supplement] 27 October 2016 | 1000 words | 5 minutes “Filter bubbles can create an increasingly fractured population, such as the one developing in America. For the many people shocked by the result of the British EU referendum, we can also partially blame filter bubbles: Facebook literally filters our friends’ views that are least palatable to us, yielding a doctored account of their personalities.” Bernie Hogan says it’s time Facebook considered ways to use the information it has about us to bring us together across political, ideological and cultural lines, rather than hide us from each other or push us into polarised and hostile camps. He says it’s not only possible for Facebook to help mitigate the issues of filter bubbles and context collapse; it’s imperative, and it’s surprisingly simple. 2. Luciano Floridi: Fake news and a 400-year-old problem: we need to resolve the ‘post-truth’ crisis [the Guardian] 29 November 2016 | 1000…

Politics & Government

Five Pieces You Should Probably Read On: The US Election

by David Sutcliffe 20/01/2017

Here are five pieces that consider the interaction of social media and democracy—the problems, but also potential ways forward.

by David Sutcliffe 20/01/2017

Image from Gage Skidmore via Flickr Creative Commons

This is the first post in a series that will uncover great writing by faculty and students at the Oxford Internet Institute, things you should probably know, and things that deserve to be brought out for another viewing. This week: The US Election. This was probably the nastiest Presidential election in recent memory: awash with Twitter bots and scandal, polarisation and filter bubbles, accusations of interference by Russia and the Director of the FBI, and another shock result. We have written about electoral prediction elsewhere: instead, here are five pieces that consider the interaction of social media and democracy—the problems, but also potential ways forward. 1. James Williams: The Clickbait Candidate 10 October 2016 | 2700 words | 13 minutes “Trump is very straightforwardly an embodiment of the dynamics of clickbait: he is the logical product (though not endpoint) in the political domain of a media environment designed to invite, and indeed incentivise, relentless competition for our attention […] Like clickbait or outrage cascades, Donald Trump is merely the sort of informational packet our media environment is designed to select for.” James Williams says that now is probably the time to have that societal conversation about the design ethics of the attention economy—because in our current media environment, attention trumps everything. 2. Sam Woolley, Philip Howard: Bots Unite to Automate the Presidential Election [Wired] 15 May 2016 | 850 words | 4 minutes “Donald Trump understands minority communities. Just ask Pepe Luis Lopez, Francisco Palma, and Alberto Contreras […] each tweeted in support of Trump after his victory in the Nevada caucuses earlier this year. The problem is, Pepe, Francisco, and Alberto aren’t people. They’re bots.” It’s no surprise that automated spam accounts (or bots) are creeping into election politics, say Sam Woolley and Philip Howard. Demanding bot transparency would at least help clean up social media—which, for better or worse, is increasingly where presidents get elected. 3. Phil Howard:…

Politics & Government

Of course social media is transforming politics. But it’s not to blame for Brexit and Trump

by Helen Margetts 09/01/2017

Mark Zuckerberg has responded with the strange claim that his company does not influence people’s decisions. So what role did social media play in the political events of 2016?

by Helen Margetts 09/01/2017

After Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, 2016 will be remembered as the year of cataclysmic democratic events on both sides of the Atlantic. Social media has been implicated in the wave of populism that led to both these developments. Attention has focused on echo chambers, with many arguing that social media users exist in ideological filter bubbles, narrowly focused on their own preferences, prey to fake news and political bots, reinforcing polarisation and leading voters to turn away from the mainstream. Mark Zuckerberg has responded with the strange claim that his company (built on $5 billion of advertising revenue) does not influence people’s decisions. So what role did social media play in the political events of 2016? Political turbulence and the new populism There is no doubt that social media has brought change to politics. From the waves of protest and unrest in response to the 2008 financial crisis, to the Arab spring of 2011, there has been a generalised feeling that political mobilisation is on the rise, and that social media had something to do with it. Our book investigating the relationship between social media and collective action, Political Turbulence, focuses on how social media allows new, “tiny acts” of political participation (liking, tweeting, viewing, following, signing petitions and so on), which turn social movement theory around. Rather than identifying with issues, forming collective identity and then acting to support the interests of that identity—or voting for a political party that supports it—in a social media world, people act first, and think about it, or identify with others later, if at all. These tiny acts of participation can scale up to large-scale mobilisations, such as demonstrations, protests or campaigns for policy change. But they almost always don’t. The overwhelming majority (99.99%) of petitions to the UK or US governments fail to get the 100,000 signatures required for a parliamentary debate (UK) or an official response (US). The very few that…

Economics, Governance & Security

Could data pay for global development? Introducing data financing for global good

by admin 03/01/2017

Are there ways in which the data economy could directly finance global causes such as climate change prevention, poverty alleviation and infrastructure?

by admin 03/01/2017

“If data is the new oil, then why aren’t we taxing it like we tax oil?” That was the essence of the provocative brief that set in motion our recent 6-month research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The results are detailed in the new report: Data Financing for Global Good: A Feasibility Study. The parallels between data and oil break down quickly once you start considering practicalities such as measuring and valuing data. Data is, after all, a highly heterogeneous good whose value is context-specific—very different from a commodity such as oil that can be measured and valued by the barrel. But even if the value of data can’t simply be metered and taxed, are there other ways in which the data economy could be more directly aligned with social good? Data-intensive industries already contribute to social good by producing useful services and paying taxes on their profits (though some pay regrettably little). But are there ways in which the data economy could directly finance global causes such as climate change prevention, poverty alleviation and infrastructure? Such mechanisms should not just arbitrarily siphon off money from industry, but also contribute value back to the data economy by correcting market failures and investment gaps. The potential impacts are significant: estimates value the data economy at around seven percent of GDP in rich industrialised countries, or around ten times the value of the United Nations development aid spending goal. Here’s where “data financing” comes in. It’s a term we coined that’s based on innovative financing, a concept increasingly used in the philanthropical world. Innovative financing refers to initiatives that seek to unlock private capital for the sake of global development and socially beneficial projects, which face substantial funding gaps globally. Since government funding towards addressing global challenges is not growing, the proponents of innovative financing are asking how else these critical causes could be funded. An existing example of innovative financing is the…

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