Living and Working Confined at Home: Boundaries and Platforms during the Lockdown

Abstract

The ubiquity of digital platforms has progressively re-structured everyday life, as individuals are embedded within a structure of permanent connectivity and surveillance. A growing literature is exploring how digital platforms play a fundamental role in consolidating platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017). Spreading across the production and reproduction of social life, digital platforms have come to significantly re-mediate social relationships and organizational processes. Digital platforms have colonized multiple areas of social life and remodelled social relations. These trends are likely to accelerate due to the COVID-19 emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a serious threat to the global economy as containment measures have been imposed to limit human mobility. At the same time, a distinction between essential and non-essential productive activities has been imposed and a new division in labour composition emerged between so called remote working and place-based jobs. In the lockdown context, people experienced the hyper-dependence of sociality on private digital platforms, creating what Van Dijck et al. (2018) call a platform society. Social space, everyday life, and everyday communication have changed. The workplace and the home have converged: the boundaries between leisure time and labour time, the office and the home, have become blurred. For many people, this tendency has meant an increase of their labour time and the necessity to manage multiple social roles at the same time in one location. Indeed, during the coronavirus crisis, many different times, spaces and social roles converged in the home. This period also highlighted again the relevance of digital literacy and of the inequalities connected with the use of digital technologies. Moreover, individuals were forced to act within the affordances of platforms designed and owned by a few private companies.