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Digital Labor
Digital labor or digital labour refers to forms of labor mediated by digital technologies, typically performed through or enabled by internet platforms, software systems, and data infrastructures. It includes a wide range of activities such as data annotation, content moderation, clickwork, platform-mediated gig work, and user-generated content. While some forms of digital labor are formally compensated, many are informal, underpaid, or entirely unpaid, often blurring the boundaries between work and leisure. Digital labor plays a foundational role in the digital economy by supplying the human input needed to train artificial intelligence (AI), maintain online platforms, and generate monetizable content and data. Scholars from media studies, sociology, information science, and political economy have examined the ways in which digital infrastructures reshape labor, value creation, and power dynamics. The term raises questions about labor rights, algorithmic control, surveillance, and t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution, sometimes divided into the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution, was a transitional period of the global economy toward more widespread, efficient and stable manufacturing processes, succeeding the Second Agricultural Revolution. Beginning in Kingdom of Great Britain, Great Britain around 1760, the Industrial Revolution had spread to continental Europe and the United States by about 1840. This transition included going from craft production, hand production methods to machines; new Chemical industry, chemical manufacturing and Puddling (metallurgy), iron production processes; the increasing use of Hydropower, water power and Steam engine, steam power; the development of machine tools; and rise of the mechanisation, mechanised factory system. Output greatly increased, and the result was an unprecedented rise in population and population growth. The textile industry was the first to use modern production methods, and textiles b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Information Age
The Information Age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during the Industrial Revolution, to an economy centered on information technology. The onset of the Information Age has been linked to the development of the transistor in 1947. This technological advance has had a significant impact on the way information is processed and transmitted. According to the United Nations Public Administration Network, the Information Age was formed by capitalizing on computer miniaturization advances, which led to modernized information systems and internet communications as the driving force of social evolution. There is ongoing debate concerning whether the Third Industrial Revolution has already ended, and if the Fourth Industrial Revolution has already begun due to the recent breakthroughs in areas such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology. This next transition has been t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disintermediation
Disintermediation is the removal of intermediary, intermediaries in economics from a supply chain, or "cutting out the middlemen" in connection with a transaction or a series of transactions. Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediary (such as a Distribution (marketing), distributor, wholesaler, broker, or agency (law), agent), companies deal with customers directly and vice versa, for example via the Internet. History In 1967, the term was originally applied to the banking industry; disintermediation occurred when consumers avoided the intermediation of banks by investing directly in Security (finance), securities (government and private bonds, insurance companies, hedge funds, mutual funds and Share capital, stocks) rather than leaving their money in savings accounts. The original cause was a U.S. government regulation (Regulation Q) which limited the interest rate paid on interest bearing accounts which were insu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website with which businesses can hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do as economically. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon. Employers, known as ''requesters,'' post jobs known as ''Human Intelligence Tasks'' (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering survey questions. Workers, colloquially known as ''Turkers'' or ''crowdworkers'', browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a fee set by the requester. To place jobs, requesters use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site. , requesters could register from 49 approved countries. History The service was conceived by Venky Harinarayan in a U.S. patent disclosure in 2001. Amazon coined the term ''artificial artificial intelligence'' for processes th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Airbnb
Airbnb, Inc. ( , an abbreviation of its original name, "Air Bed and Breakfast") is an American company operating an online marketplace for short-and-long-term homestays, experiences and services in various countries and regions. It acts as a broker and charges a commission (remuneration), commission from each booking. Airbnb was founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia. It is the best-known company for short-term housing rentals. History After moving to San Francisco in October 2007, roommates and former schoolmates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia came up with an idea of putting an air mattress in their living room and turning it into a bed and breakfast. In February 2008, Nathan Blecharczyk, Chesky's former roommate, joined as the chief technology officer and the third co-founder of the new venture, which they named "AirBed & Breakfast". They put together a website that offered short-term living quarters and breakfast for those who were unable to bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in approximately 70 countries and 15,000 cities worldwide. It is the largest ridesharing company worldwide with over 150 million monthly active users and 6 million active drivers and couriers. It coordinates an average of 28 million trips per day, and has coordinated 47 billion trips since its inception in 2010. In 2023, the company had a take rate (revenue as a percentage of gross bookings) of 28.7% for mobility services and 18.3% for food delivery. History In 2009, Garrett Camp, a co-founder of StumbleUpon, came up with the idea to create Uber to make it easier and cheaper to procure direct transportation. Camp and Travis Kalanick had spent $800 hiring a private driver on New Year's Eve, which they deemed excessive, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Participatory Culture
Participatory culture, an opposing concept to consumer culture, is a culture in which private individuals (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media. Overview Recent advances in technologies (mostly personal computers and the Internet) have enabled private persons to create and publish such media, usually through the Internet. Since technology now enables new forms of expression and engagement in public discourse, participatory culture not only supports individual creation but also informal relationships that pair novices with experts.Jenkins, Henry, Puroshotma, Ravi, Clinton, Katherine, Weigel, Margaret, & Robison, Alice J. (2005). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, available at http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/NMLWhitePaper.pdf. Retrieved on 2/4/2013. Thi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Platform Capitalism
Platform capitalism refers to the activities of companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon and others to operate as platforms. In this business model both hardware and software are used as a foundation (platform) for other actors to conduct their own business.L. Weatherby, "Delete Your Account: On the Theory of Platform Capitalism," Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018. Platform capitalism has been both heralded as beneficialA. McAfee and E. Brynjolfsson, Machine, platform, crowd : harnessing our digital future. W. W. Norton and Company, 2017. and denounced as detrimentalJ. Lanier, Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. Henry Holt and Co., 2018. by various authors. The trends identified in platform capitalism have similarities with those described under the heading of surveillance capitalism.S. Zuboff, The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs, 2019. Technolo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microwork
Microwork is a series of many small tasks which together comprise a large unified project, and it is completed by many people over the Internet. Microwork is considered the smallest unit of work in a virtual assembly line. It is most often used to describe tasks for which no efficient algorithm has been devised, and require human intelligence to complete reliably. The term was developed in 2008 by Leila Chirayath Janah of Samasource. Microtasking Microtasking is the process of disaggregated work, splitting a large job into small tasks that can be distributed, over the Internet, to many people. Since the inception of microwork, many online services have been developed that specialize in different types of microtasking. Most of them rely on a large, voluntary workforce composed of Internet users from around the world. Typical tasks offered are repetitive but not so simple that they can be automated. Good candidates for microtasks have the following characteristics: * They are la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Algorithmic Management
Algorithmic management is a term used to describe certain labor management practices in the contemporary digital economy. In scholarly uses, the term was initially coined in 2015 by Min Kyung Lee, Daniel Kusbit, Evan Metsky, and Laura Dabbish to describe the managerial role played by algorithms on the Uber and Lyft platforms, but has since been taken up by other scholars to describe more generally the managerial and organisational characteristics of platform economies. However, digital direction of labor was present in manufacturing already since the 1970s and algorithmic management is becoming increasingly widespread across a wide range of industries. The concept of algorithmic management can be broadly defined as the delegation of managerial functions to algorithmic and automated systems. Algorithmic management has been enabled by "recent advances in digital technologies" which allow for the real-time and "large-scale collection of data" which is then used to "improve learning alg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Surveillance Capitalism
Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, although the two can be mutually reinforcing. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely. Increased data collection may have various benefits for individuals and society, such as self-optimization (the quantified self), societal optimizations (e.g., by smart cities) and optimized services (including various web applications). However, as capitalism focuses on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing, this can have significant implications for vulnerability and control of society, as well as for privacy. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Invisible Labour
Invisible labor is a philosophical, sociological, and economic concept applying to work that is unseen, unvalued or undervalued, and often discounted as not important, despite its essential role in supporting the functioning of workplaces, families, teams, and organizations. The term was coined by Arlene Kaplan Daniels in the 1980s. The term has been applied to academics, scientists, interpreters, wait staff, secretaries, and women in the household, who bear most of the invisible labor in terms of cleaning, planning, and organizing. Even when women are equally employed, they still are responsible for the majority of invisible labor, including cognitive labor. Invisible labor has a toll on the mental, physical, and psychological well-being of those who perform it, and it reflects ongoing power dynamics and gender imbalances between those whose work 'counts' and those whose work remains 'unseen.' Invisible labor also falls disproportionately on marginalized groups as a factor of r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
