Constructing the Digital

The AoIR Flashpoint Symposium conducted in Hyderabad, India, explored multiple facets of digital labour–that which takes place through and on platforms, monitored or managed via digital interfaces, as well as forms of work that contribute to building, maintaining, and populating digital infrastructures. The discussions at the symposium proceeded from the recognition of the need for regulation with the consumer of technology as our main object of concern, while also attending to the humans at the center of the machinery of production–those who build the insides of the machines (coders, designers, annotators) as well as those who make the content that flows through it. This panel extends the discussions at the Symposium with five papers that attend to different types of digital/digitally-enabled work: content creation and curation, app-based services, infrastructuring through tech work, and advocacy for a just and open digital commons. Together, the papers intend to make visible how the everyday labour of those in the Global South undergirds the global network of digital goods, services, and infrastructures–both materially and discursively. We think of the digital economy and culture in planetary terms (Graham & Ferrari, 2022), driven by technologies largely imagined in the West even as they are enabled in very specific ways by workers in the Global South. Much recent work in rapidly digitizing geographies in South Asia and Latin America has pointed to the embedded nature of the digital, as technology and as experience. Cultural creators on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Spotify speak to increasingly dispersed audiences, their content subject to a variety of regulatory regimes monitored and managed in algorithmically impenetrable ways . Gig workers find their work patterns are constrained and defined by interfaces driven by neo-colonial imaginaries that defy regulation yet prompt innovative forms of resistance. Public discourse veers between the celebratory and the cautionary, as in much of the globe, with states responding, in turn, with shut downs and penalties and sops and incentives. The papers in this panel while locating their arguments and their insights in the specific context of India, also speak to the need for imaginaries that are at once broad and contextual, that take from aspirational articulations while rejecting a universalising logic, whether in the realm of design, or use, or regulation

Computer Science · ICT Impact and Policies