Digitally mediated hospitality and algorithmic hostility in the platform economy: Emerging interactions across the virtual domain

Abstract

The platform economy continues to draw scholarly attention. However, the human impacts and social elements of platform work remain under-researched and poorly understood. Framed by Lashley’s domains of hospitality, this article investigates where and how platform-based food delivery workers – predominantly migrants – interact with others. This involved a multi-sited ethnography including face-to-face and digital participant observation (predominantly bicycle shadowing), and semi-structured interviews with food delivery workers and key stakeholders. The findings illustrate where interactions occur within the commercial, private and social domains of hospitality. The article then documents digital interactions that transpire beyond existing domains – demonstrating the need for a new virtual domain – which accounts for exchanges at the threshold of material and virtual contexts. The article then discusses how digital, physical and embodied artefacts are used to mediate hospitality. Finally, this article introduces the concept of algorithmic hostility to demonstrate how platforms, restaurant staff, customers and others utilize digital technologies and existing social divisions to exploit contingent workers – furthering our understanding of how people interact at the human-digital frontier.