Curious encounters: the social consolations of digital platform work in the gig economy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores interpersonal encounters between workers and consumers who use gig economy apps to investigate how urban sociality is changing. It responds to calls for geographic research on planned, technologically mediated encounters to better discern how digital technologies are impacting patterns of sociality. Acknowledging the diversity of relations with multiple others that happen via digital platforms, our paper is concerned with an affirmative sociality associated with curiosity. Through fieldwork encounters with workers in Melbourne’s gig economy, our paper draws out three different configurations of social curiosity: wonder, enchantment and empathy. Though curiosity sparked by exposure to other worlds can serve the interests of digital platform companies, we argue curious encounters transform social relations beyond the timespace of the encounter itself. Curious encounters, we suggest, have a reparative dimension for some workers. In sum, our paper supplements political economy accounts of digital platform work through a cultural geographical sensitivity to changing social relations.