platforms

It's Crowded at the Bottom: Trust, Visibility, and Search Algorithms on Care.com

ABSTRACT

Trust, visibility, and the deepening of existing inequalities are major themes within the platform care work literature. However, no study to date has applied these themes to an analysis of worker profiles. I investigate both how workers communicate trustworthiness through their profiles on Care.com, the world’s largest care work platform, and which of these profiles are rendered more and less visible to clients. Through a qualitative content analysis of profiles (n=60) sampled from the top and bottom search results in three different US zip codes, I find that visibility is often related to connectivity, response time, and positive reviews, and who is rendered visible mirrors preexisting inequalities. The language of “passion” for the job is common across top and bottom profiles, indicating a contradiction between the deemphasis on professionalization and the high level of connectivity and responsiveness present in top profiles.

Data Perversion: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Datafication

ABSTRACT

This article adopts a psychoanalytic perspective and argues that users are in a perverse relationship with contemporary platforms. Following a review of recent critical scholarship on datafication, which places too much emphasis on platforms and situates users as helpless, the psychoanalytic concept of perversion is introduced. Perversion describes a relationship that is characterised by dominance, exploitation and dehumanization as well as care, love, and idealization. While the pervert (the platform and its owners and developers) is the perpetrator, the other (the user) is also actively participating in the perverse relationship. Contemporary relations are thus marked by foregrounding connectivity, convenience and communication which mask the violence of datafication. Such relations are upheld, because users affirmatively reproduce them by using highly attractive platforms which are customized for each individual. Psychoanalysis can thus offer a complex conceptualisation of the interplay between affirmation, attraction and exploitation that is immanent to platforms and users today.