Platform Work: From Digital Promises to Labor Challenges

The pervasiveness of the digital ecosystem reconfigures the organization of work. The new industrial revolution is increasingly based on the platform as a new productive paradigm. Platforms are more than a technical device and they produce huge effects in the labour market: lowering access credentials and empowering casualization of work, dis/re-intermediation labour demand and supply, affecting motivations and rewarding systems, reconfiguring process of control and risks transfer, renewing regulative standards, or re-organize representativeness and welfare protection. Fragmentation, precariousness, flexibility and instability become permanent traits of the workforce fostering the emergence of the cybertariat. Moreover, connectivity, evaluation and surveillance determine new working conditions tested on workers outside any bargaining process or institutional work arrangement. Platform workers (both high skilled and low skilled) are still largely unorganized and isolated. Similarly to other non-standard workers, they are exposed to the risk of exploitation and free work in a fast evolving economy based on reputation. Despite platform workers are highly differentiated and heterogeneous and difficult to organize collectively, forms of collective action are emerging at local and cross-national level

Research on Honors Composition, 2004–2015

The spring/summer 2004 issue of the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council (JNCHC) was devoted exclusively to research in honors education. The issue was divided into three sections: the introductory Forum on Research in Honors, which revisited three essays published in Forum for Honors in 1984 and included two 2004 responses; Research in Honors; and Research about Honors. After I had revised my dissertation for the 2003 NCHC monograph Honors Composition: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Practices, I incorporated some of my unused dissertation material for two pieces in the issue, one being a response essay in the Forum, “Research in Honors and Composition,” and the other an article in the Research in Honors section, “Faculty Compensation and Course Assessment in Honors Composition,” using material that my dissertation director thought was too political to survive the dissertation defense

From Research Aesthetics to Habits of Mind: Student Publishing as a Core Competency

Student open access publishing offers a useful avenue for academic information literacy in preparation for real-world experiences. Worthwhile drivers of connected learning, digital research and institutional repositories are practical ecosystems for conveying the complexities of the economics and ethics of information creation, access, and use. Drawing on essential concepts, NSUWorks exemplifies a dynamic tool for learners’ engagement with the research lifecycle and for fostering dispositions of critical thinking, reading, and composing for success and professional development

Digital Simulation as Learning Aid for Heat Flow in Solid Theoretical Understanding

Understanding the physical phenomena is extremely aided by digital simulations for understanding physical phenomena that occur, especially for students in the digital era and in this new-normal period. This paper describes heat conduction in solids using the Energy2D program, starting from general formulations for heat conduction from conductors to general solids that show the mechanism of heat conduction as a diffusion process. The thermal diffusivity parameter determines heat diffusion as the ratio between thermal conductivity and multiplication between density and thermal capacity. From the practical side, heat conduction is ordinary using thermal resistance (R-value) that combines the dimensions of the material in the direction of heat flow and thermal conductivity. By taking an analogy with Ohm's law for electrical circuits, it can be determined the equivalent resistance of several thermal resistance of the material that is composed in series or parallel. A good understanding of the heat transport process in buildings is needed for the development of technologies required for the comfort of human life and energy conservation. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17977/um024v5i12020p01

A Third Place: The &/ Project

This chapter presents And Or, an international digital research project reimagining the relationship between art, interpretation, exhibition, and theory. An interdisciplinary collective, we have opted to found a collaborative space rather than remain eternal guests in one another’s domains. And Or is both an online exhibition project and investigatory work, inviting collaborators to critically experiment with each others’ work in an online context. In establishing new ground within the dematerialized digital, we seek to create a third space where writing and art can be brought together in new configurations. As part of this approach, we have confronted the necessity of interrogating the relative positions of the curator and the viewer. This text presents the theoretical and artistic underpinnings of the And Or project and describes our current, past, and future productions in this exploration of a third space and an alternative art experience

Layered encounters: mainstream cinema and the disaggregate digital composite

The digital surface in cinema has, throughout its relatively brief history, been subject to a familiar “iconophobic” tendency, documented by Rosalind Galt (2011), to denigrate surface decoration as “empty spectacle” (p. 2). In early scholarship on computer generated (CG) images in cinema, the digital surface’s alleged seamlessness and “new depthlessness” (Sobchack (1994, p. 123n) and Landon (1992, p.66) respectively, in Pierson, 1999, p.167) frequently became an overdetermined nexus of loss: of material presence, of an indexical relation to the world and lived experience, and of the continuation of older traditions of narrative cinema. Today, digital visual effects sequences in mainstream cinema continue to be framed by film reviewers in negative terms: as variously lacking imagination, realism, narrative depth, and affective power. Digital visual effects and digital media scholarship have done much to reclaim the cultural significance of mainstream digital visual effects sequences and their capacity to speak to a rapidly evolving and increasingly encompassing digital media ecology. Yet the formal heterogeneity of this evolving period of mainstream aesthetic consolidation and experimentation with digital images, surfaces and spaces has yet to be fully acknowledged. This article seeks to contribute to this broader task by focussing on the mainstream cinematic history of the digital composite, and specifically those moments where it displays a particularly self-reflexive character. If the digital composite has traditionally been characterised by its attempt to totally erase signs of its composite nature, across the period of CG images’ proliferation in cinema an occasional figure emerges seeks to do the opposite: a digital composite that formally fragments, foregrounds, and scrutinises the digital surfaces that constitute it. Drawing on scholarship on the computer image, digital media and the post-cinematic, this article will argue that these returns of the self-conscious digital composite speak meaningfully to their historical context

Digital Socialism Beyond the Digital Social: Confronting Communicative Capitalism with Ethics of Care

This paper analyses the role of the "social" in communicative capitalism. It shows how the digital social is situated in the context of ideology, exploitation, and alienation. Based on the ethics of care, the essay outlines foundations of an alternative concept and reality of the social in digital socialism. It borrows the key concept of "care" from feminist theory and ethics and uses it to explore alternative paths to rethink "digital socialism" in the age of social media ubiquity and the pervasiveness of communicative capitalism. We need imaginative efforts to think beyond "capitalist realism" as a "pervasive atmosphere" (Fisher 2009, 16) that impacts not just the economy and cultural production, but also the domain of the ideas to the extent that it seems "impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it" (Fisher 2009, 2)

From Loopholes to Deinstitutionalization: The Platform Economy and the Undermining of Labor and Social Security Institutions

Previous research on platform work has concentrated on questions of organization, technology and regulation, while the focus has been much less on institutions and mechanisms by which platform work challenges existing labor market and welfare state institutions. This article deals with platform-driven deinstitutionalization using the example of social security in the conservative German welfare state. We argue that the main feature of platform work is the weakening of labor- and welfare-related institutions. We show how platforms undermine the German social security scheme in a functional perspective by using solo self-employment or minijobs, resulting in varieties of externalization of social protection. Furthermore, the social security institutions are normatively undermined by the strategic use of two main narratives: while the sharing narrative negates power asymmetries and highlights peer-to-peer relationships at eye level, the entrepreneurship narrative promotes ideas of autonomy and self-realization. Both strategies aim at redefining social security institutions and undermining collective protection. We discuss the disruptive effects of platform work and the inability of the social security institutions in Germany to adjust to the digital age and ensure sufficient social protection for workers in non-standard forms of employment. The analysis also implies that future regulatory policies have to take power struggles over cultural framings into account

From Loopholes to Deinstitutionalization: The Platform Economy and the Undermining of Labor and Social Security Institutions

Previous research on platform work has concentrated on questions of organization, technology and regulation, while the focus has been much less on institutions and mechanisms by which platform work challenges existing labor market and welfare state institutions. This article deals with platform-driven deinstitutionalization using the example of social security in the conservative German welfare state. We argue that the main feature of platform work is the weakening of labor- and welfare-related institutions. We show how platforms undermine the German social security scheme in a functional perspective by using solo self-employment or minijobs, resulting in varieties of externalization of social protection. Furthermore, the social security institutions are normatively undermined by the strategic use of two main narratives: while the sharing narrative negates power asymmetries and highlights peer-to-peer relationships at eye level, the entrepreneurship narrative promotes ideas of autonomy and self-realization. Both strategies aim at redefining social security institutions and undermining collective protection. We discuss the disruptive effects of platform work and the inability of the social security institutions in Germany to adjust to the digital age and ensure sufficient social protection for workers in non-standard forms of employment. The analysis also implies that future regulatory policies have to take power struggles over cultural framings into account