ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

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The Macro Frames of Microwork

Based on a qualitative study of women microworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, this paper explores the gendered modus operandi of global platform capitalism. For women from households negotiating caste and class status in small-town South India, digital labour platforms like AMT are the optimal choice; an answer to both economic necessity and familial validation. Women must, however, endure the platform’s coercive disciplining, striving to meet its unknowable metrics. With the pandemic, even as they are forced to contend with the oppressive precarity of digital labour—reducing job availability, falling pay, longer hours and the risk of suspension—work on AMT, paradoxically, becomes non-negotiable. The artificial intelligence-based regimes of the platform economy urgently need a norm shift towards gender equality and redistributive justice.

 

Violence against Women via Cyberspace

A report on a consultation on women and the use of information technologies that addressed how policy choices need to avoid narratives of fear around new technologies, narratives that can effectively constrain women's freedom to use digital spaces.

Internet Governance and Development Agenda

The internet is a building block of the information society and as such its governance is an important issue. What are the issues related to internet governance and how can they be dealt with? How may the Internet Governance Forum contribute to participatory decision-making? These are important issues ahead of the next IGF meeting, to be held in India in end-2008.

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