This book provides a balanced and nuanced study of how the super-sticky WeChat platform interweaves into the fabric of Chinese social, cultural, and political life. It keeps the wider global and ...national social media landscape in view and compares and contrasts WeChat with Weibo, QQ and other Western social media platforms.
The idea of the "digital divide," the great social division between information haves and have-nots, has dominated policy debates and scholarly analysis since the 1990s. In Working-Class Network ...Society, Jack Linchuan Qiu describes a more complex social and technological reality in a newly mobile, urbanizing China. Qiu argues that as inexpensive Internet and mobile phone services become available and are closely integrated with the everyday work and life of low-income communities, they provide a critical seedbed for the emergence of a new working class of "network labor" crucial to China's economic boom. Between the haves and have-nots, writes Qiu, are the information "have-less": migrants, laid-off workers, micro-entrepreneurs, retirees, youth, and others, increasingly connected by cybercafés, prepaid service, and used mobile phones. A process of class formation has begun that has important implications for working-class network society in China and beyond. Qiu brings class back into the scholarly discussion, not as a secondary factor but as an essential dimension in our understanding of communication technology as it is shaped in the vast, industrializing society of China. Basing his analysis on his more than five years of empirical research conducted in twenty cities, Qiu examines technology and class, networked connectivity and public policy, in the context of massive urban reforms that affect the new working class disproportionately. The transformation of Chinese society, writes Qiu, is emblematic of the new technosocial reality emerging in much of the Global South.
Digital media platforms are becoming increasingly subject to the sway of geopolitics, as seen during the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US-China trade war. How are platforms becoming ...geopoliticized? What perspectives shall we use to make sense of the process? This theoretical paper reformulates conceptual apparatuses of liberalism, realism, and constructivism, each represented by a metaphor: the cobweb, billiard balls, and ant societies, respectively. The approaches are introduced, critiqued, and compared to understand platform geopoliticization more historically and imaginatively on global as well as regional and local scales. The discussions propel platform studies to be grounded and multi-layered, concerning not only the apex of politico-economic power but also grassroots and communal praxis, for example, metis. While the pendulum is swinging from transnational capital to nation-states, it is insufficient to restrict our thinking to (neo)realism vis-à-vis (neo)liberalism. A moderate version of constructivism—the “ant societies” model—hence needs articulation, which holds important conceptual and methodological implications.
Technology flows are becoming increasingly diverse in the twenty-first century, calling for an update of concepts and frameworks. Reflecting on the inherent tensions of technology transfer, including ...its technocratic dreams, insensitivity to technological materiality, and narrow focus on certain human actors, we propose technology translation as a complementary conceptual framework to understand traveling technologies. Taking a socio-technical approach, technology translation views artifacts as socially shaped with distributed agency, which makes technology flows unstable and unpredictable. In so doing, we develop a typology to explain five technology flow scenarios, shedding new light on the mechanisms of technology traveling by foregrounding the role of translators. Last, we discuss the politics of translation and elaborate how technology translation opens new space to engage with the complexity and uncertainty of technology flows, especially in the Global South.
Posthuman is a social condition of humans losing control, especially to technological forces, and a cultural framing beyond Enlightenment modernity. Building on the posthuman critique, this article ...examines digital labour and food delivery platforms during Covid-19 in Asian contexts. The main argument is that, while reinforcing inequalities through algorithm-based discrimination and control, the pandemic also creates openings for progressive change towards the humanizing of the posthuman, through human–non-human assemblage as well as ‘sticky labour’. As such, Covid-19 is more than a crisis that signifies the end of the ‘old normal’. It is, more importantly, another moment when existential crisis triggers innovation in working-class network society, leading to novel discourses, practices, and networks. How and why did this happen? What are the implications for pandemic-era cultural shaping of the digital? These questions will be discussed.
“Plataformas” digitais como Google, Amazon e Uber têm vindo a ser alvo de duras críticas desde meados da década de 2010. Estes gigantes tecnológicos de Silicon Valley são problemáticos, uma vez que ...os seus modelos de negócio se baseiam na vigilância secreta de dados e em marketing direcionado. A sua ausência de responsabilidade social traduz-se em evasão fiscal e trabalho precário. A sua natureza imperialista, enquanto media digital, é prejudicial porquanto mina a inovação independente, quer ...
Goodbye iSlave Qiu, Jack Linchuan
11/2016, Letnik:
9
eBook
Welcome to a brave new world of capitalism propelled by high tech, guarded by enterprising authority, and carried forward by millions of laborers being robbed of their souls. Gathered into mammoth ...factory complexes and terrified into obedience, these workers feed the world's addiction to iPhones and other commodities--a generation of iSlaves trapped in a global economic system that relies upon and studiously ignores their oppression. Focusing on the alliance between Apple and the notorious Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn, Jack Linchuan Qiu examines how corporations and governments everywhere collude to build systems of domination, exploitation, and alienation. His interviews, news analysis, and first-hand observation show the circumstances faced by Foxconn workers--circumstances with vivid parallels in the Atlantic slave trade. Qiu also shows how the fanatic consumption of digital media also creates compulsive free labor that constitutes a form of bondage for the user. Arguing as a digital abolitionist, Qiu draws inspiration from transborder activist groups and forms of grassroots resistance to make a passionate plea aimed at uniting--and liberating--the forgotten workers who make our twenty-first-century lives possible.
Adolescent behavior is often negatively viewed especially regarding work experience. By introducing a concept of prosocial behavior, our study attempts to provide an alternative view on the effects ...of teenage job and work experience. We hypothesized that work experience could generate more prosocial behaviors. By surveying a large group of working-class youth (N = 2,860) from eight Chinese vocational schools and using structural equation modeling, we confirmed that the pattern of “having less, giving more” could be found in our sample. Our findings revealed that work experience could facilitate prosocial behavior via the increase of knowledge of both contract-based rights and labor action. By understanding working-class youth’s prosocial behavior as a positive outcome of work experience, this study calls for further research on other positive outcomes, such as cooperation, civic engagement, and solidarity, among working-class youth.
This paper questions the binary of material and immaterial labour in the information era. Instead, we propose a “circuits of labour” model, a holistic framework that helps connect various concepts ...and traditions in the study of labour and ICT (information and communication technology). Inspired by du Gay et al’s “circuit of culture”, we argue conventional frameworks need to be synthesized and updated to reflect fundamental changes and persisting issues of labor in our contemporary era, of which the iPhone is emblematic. On the one hand, our model consists of formal circuits, in which hierarchical domination is imposed by capital over the body of labour. On the other hand, it consists of informal circuits where relationships are defined communally between embodied practices and social and communicative capital. The informal and formal circuits of labour are “short-circuited” by survival labour and ‘playbour’, meaning either circuit may absorb productive energy from the other. This article then uses the case of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronic manufacturer that also produces iPhones, to illustrate the usefulness of the “circuits of labour” model. We finally discuss the broader implications and questions for future research.
« Je veux qu’on me rende l’argent que j’ai gagné avec mon sang et ma sueur » (Wo yao wode xuehan qian 我要我的血汗錢) : voilà les paroles prononcées par Liu Jin 劉進, un coursier de 47 ans qui travaillait ...pour la plateforme de livraison de repas d’Alibaba Ele.me, avant de s’immoler par le feu au début du mois de janvier 2021. Ce drame qui a suscité des débats animés sur les réseaux sociaux chinois, est survenu après la mort d’un jeune homme de 22 ans employé chez Pinduoduo, une autre entreprise d’e-co...
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