The entanglement of emotional labour and digital work platforms
A study of how professional gamers, influencers, and gig and crowd workers experience the affordances of digital work platforms
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/mk.v40i78.137268Keywords:
Emotional labour, Platformisation, Gig economy, Influencers, HarassmentAbstract
Today, work is increasingly performed on or through various digital platforms. This article aims to study workers at the forefront of digital labour. Drawing on 29 qualitative interviews with professional gamers, influencers, and platform workers, this study explores how digital platform affordances across diverse types of platform-mediated work shape the performance of emotional labour. The article’s main contribution is showing how workers experience the affordances of the platforms and, further, how the affordances of the platforms demand the performance of extensive emotional labour from the workers. This article shows how two high-level affordances mainly contribute to this: the capacity to transcend physical space and the immediacy and multiplicity of the digital distribution of information and data.
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