This core of feeling that the internet is a tool is evident also in how the freelancers talked about connection and being with others. Of course, the internet provides the freelancer with the necessary, and sometimes only available connection to others. For two hours every week I meet with a colleague sociologist I have only met three times while teaching in Bogotá (see Figure 4.8). We share many interests, and connect just to keep each other company while writing, and to tell each other about our accomplishments or what has been going on during the week.
Figure 4.8: Photo of my setting and sessions with Yenny. Source: Image by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
But these internet-mediated platforms for connection don’t feel like a replacement for face-to-face encounters, for either of us. In fact, for all of the freelancers I studied, the internet mediated connection alone is inadequate for feeling a sense of being with others. Elena says it is still key to her work to meet others in person, and this is also the case for all the mobile freelancers including myself. Some say they love meeting others in person as part of their jobs. For me, meeting with others in person feels rewarding and productive. It helps me to ‘get out of my head’ and develop ideas in an informal way.
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The connection provided by the internet allows us to be in the life of others who are far away and exchange certain types of information, but for the freelancers I studied it does not translate into a feeling of complete co-presence, or satisfy the need to be in physical contact with others. Quite the opposite, being connected through technologies carries a constant feeling of incompleteness and unfulfillment. The feelings of isolation among remote workers has been widely studied; this literature stresses the importance of “networking opportunities” and the use of, for instance, co-working spaces (Avdikos & Kalogeresis, 2016; Gandini, 2016, pp. 27–44, 97–106; Garrett et al., 2017; Spinuzzi, 2012). Many of us share the feeling that we have to be in places physically with others to do our jobs, and we agree that while these connected technologies are useful, they are—no matter how sophisticated—insufficient. It takes losing just some bits of information during a conversation that is supposed to be synchronous, to also lose the sense of connection and mutual presence. This relates to Markham’s critique of the common conflation of information transmission and communication, as if the instrumental means and content of information exchange is the same as meaningful interaction.
conclusion
The metaphors of tool, place, and way of being prove to be useful to analyze mobile freelancer’s understandings of the internet. Objectified understandings of the internet and frictions shape the meaning of the Internet and show its limitations. Even though we all have limited resources in time, money and energy, the way mobile freelancers deal with the materiality of digital technologies connected to the internet is specific to life conditions as these resources are usually uncertain, self-provided, and related to constant movement. Even though many of the participants in this research speak about the internet as being virtual and different from physical reality, we endure its materiality every day. Frictions in the flows represented by mobile work and the flow of information manifest when the technologies we use cease to work, and our socio-economic conditions—often precarious—open up for certain possibilities and closes others.
We are involved in a constant placemaking in our devices and through our devices. Place continues to be important and the internet helps create the feeling of a transitory shared work place. This sense of co-presence is nevertheless fragile, and not enough to generate the sense of having a strong bond or to avoid the feeling of isolation. The ability to be in contact and exchange information with others in real time makes certain things possible, but is not enough, because it is understood as an incomplete connection to others. This incompleteness is explained in part by the work conditions of mobile freelancers, where relationships and network opportunities aren’t a given and have to be sought for continuously.
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As I have shown, project-based and ICT-mediated mobile work does not necessarily represent freedom and a privileged lifestyle. It is certainly a tool for work, but not an emancipatory one. If one is tempted to apply a naïve Marxist analysis regarding the possession of the means of production in the context of capitalism, I have shown that it does not entail freedom from constraints attached in this case to the labor market. The Internet is also a place for the exchange of information, but not a place for being with others and learning informally. The internet as a forced way of being is highlighted when we reflect on how difficult it is to be present or disconnect from our working selves. The internet does not support a free-style identity, which could be supposed from the possibility to personalize and supposedly adapt these technologies to our needs.
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1 I started this autoethnography (inspired by Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Pensoneau-Conway & Toyosaki, 2011) on December 2015. It is still ongoing. I wrote, filmed and voice recorded fieldwork journals, and recorded interviews both face to face and remotely with eight mobile freelancers working in different fields (university teaching and research, design, digital code developers, and culture related-professions). Constantí, Laura and Thilo are programmers. They are in a better position to find paid labor compared to Muriel, Alvaro, Elena and myself. Muriel is a cultural mediator, she finds “the field of culture much more precarious (…) in Spain [compared to the UK where she used to live].” Alvaro and myself are academic researchers with no access to a well-paid or stable jobs in desirable conditions in the Spanish university system. Loli, a PhD who transitioned from an academic career to an academic freelancer, is able to find projects to work on, but describes the situation as unpredictable and underpaid. Elena is transitioning from being a consultant for public institutions in one country to a writer in another one, and she acknowledges her family’s financial support and her own savings as allowing her to continue this personal and professional project.
jeff thompson
Turker Computers is a project that sets out to make visible the personal, varied relationship between a person and their computer. A simple request was made on Amazon’s crowd-labor site Mechanical Turk over a period of approximately a year: take a photograph of your computer, and include a name (or handle/alias) and where you live (as vague as you like). The responses came from locations across the globe, a selection of which is shown in this art reel. The images from this project turn the webcam around, not showing the people who populate the internet, or make the internet work, but the machines we collaborate with to access it and the spaces in which we use them.
The images of the technology economy we see most often are of hip offices, open floorplans, and ping-pong tables. But many of the online services that we think of as being digital are in fact a modulation of automation and human intervention (cf. Sarah T. Roberts’ new book Behind the Screen (2019) for a critical take on the invisible work of content moderation). Our experience with our computer, seemingly intimate and one-directional, is very often mirrored on the other end by a tech laborer and their machine. While having humans perform physical computation isn’t new,1 seeing the physical space in which this work happens makes the issue of class very clear. Turkers (the name given by this community for someone ←47 | 48→who does work on Mechanical Turk) make for an average of $1.20 to $5.00 USD per hour (Folbre, 2013)2 and do not spend their days in fancy Bay Area offices, taking advantage of unlimited vacation time or free meals. In these images we see where Turkers work: coffee tables, desks in a home office, on top of beds, in the kitchen or basement.