ORCID Profile
0000-0003-1356-3518
Current Organisations
University of Bologna
,
IULM University
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Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2023
DOI: 10.1177/20539517231182393
Abstract: In recent years, several scholars have highlighted the necessity to scrutinize the practices and material settings in which algorithmic models are designed, in order to unpack the working activities and socio-cultural constructs underlying their production and deployment process. Drawing on a multisited ethnography, this paper investigates the practices of tech workers within the corporate environment of an internet television platform, the hierarchical relationships between different professional figures, and how these in iduals frame algorithms and contribute to the enactment of these systems with their activities. Findings highlight the hierarchical organization of tech work and the subordination of operative figures to the goals imposed by business clients and to both internal and external forms of control. Specifically, it emerges how the subalternity of tech workers is materially and discursively constructed and forms of causal, dispositional and facilitative power exerted on them. In this environment, frictions, negotiations as well as concealing strategies by tech workers regarding the design and meaning of algorithms emerge, thus showing their cultural, contingent and multiple composition. Within the framework of Giddens’ structure/agency cycle, it is shown how everyday working activities and relationships contribute to the reproduction of hegemonic arrangements in the workplace, and how these hegemonic arrangements are at the core of algorithmic production, thus playing a key role in the framing, construction and enactment of these systems.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-01-2023
DOI: 10.1177/13548565221148108
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a further extension of the sociotechnical logics of digital platforms to every realm of social life. Given the colonialist, oppressive and exploitative dynamics through which digital platforms work, several scholars supported the need to embrace an openly activist role to help in iduals contrast the ways in which they are trapped in loops of dependency and trajectorism. Drawing on the results of 40 auto-ethnographic diaries, this paper showcases the usefulness of critical pedagogical techniques in enhancing critical awareness regarding hegemonic datafication structures, while also arguing that despite a good level of consciousness raising, it remains difficult for people to go beyond subalternity and make more concrete changes in personal and collective behaviors. We contend that to break persistent feelings of dependency, it is necessary to go further with a two-step process combining autoethnographic tools, aimed at increasing critical algorithmic awareness, with the development of data science skills that can help in iduals acquiring more precise knowledge schemes and scaling down the power of giant corporations, thereby building in idual and collective capacities to use data for developing counter-narratives about possible futures.
Publisher: IGI Global
Date: 03-09-2022
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-8473-6.CH017
Abstract: The role of digital platforms in everyday life is a concern within different research fields therefore, several authors have supported the need to investigate them and their underlying meshing of human and computational logic. In this chapter, the authors present a methodological proposal according to which auto-ethnographic diaries can be fruitfully employed to examine the relationship between in iduals and algorithmic platforms. By drawing on a critical pedagogy approach, they consider auto-ethnography both as a practice of access to algorithmic logics through rich first-hand data regarding everyday usage practices as a response to datafication. The core idea behind this narrative method is to use inductive self-reflexive methodological tools to help in iduals critically reflect on their daily activities, thereby making their consumption of algorithmic contents more aware and allowing researchers to collect in-depth reports about their use of digital platforms and the following processes of subjectification.
Publisher: No publisher found
Date: 2021
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 02-02-2022
DOI: 10.1108/IJSSP-07-2020-0350
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the measures of social distancing and home confinement have been perceived and experienced in the Italian socio-cultural context, how they reshaped everyday life and which are their social implications. The study was exploratory and interpretative in nature and a qualitative research design was adopted accordingly. A total of 60 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted. Research findings highlight the fact that the boundaries of everyday practices have been completely reframed during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Italy. Informants show that scarcity of personal spaces, intertwined with the collapse of the boundaries between private and professional life, and also the lack of physical contact, resulted in a complex management of different social roles and in a stress overload. There are no prior studies that critically analyse the lived experiences of in iduals during the lockdown and the impact of home confinement on their meaning-making processes. This paper sheds light on the reframing of everyday life, thereby enhancing our understanding of a novel issue that is of primary concern for social scientists.
Publisher: Lectito BV
Date: 18-12-2020
DOI: 10.20897/JCASC/9253
Publisher: University of Illinois Libraries
Date: 15-09-2021
DOI: 10.5210/SPIR.V2021I0.12018
Abstract: Today using the Internet implies primarily using digital platforms, that actively participate in the co-construction of social life. In this scenario, users have often been depicted as powerless, subjected to exploitative commercial practices, and as having internalized their condition of surveilled and datafied in iduals. However, little attention has been paid to how in iduals make sense of algorithms in their everyday life and how exert their agency while using platforms. Furthermore, little is known regarding how researchers can actively elicit critical reflections regarding structures of datafication, thereby helping in iduals increase their awareness and data literacy. This paper contends that auto-ethnographic diaries, elaborated following a critical pedagogical approach, can be valuable to investigate user practices and how algorithms are enacted in everyday life by those practices. Furthermore, a critical pedagogy approach can raise awareness among in iduals regarding processes of pervasive datafication and surveillance, thereby being a way to redistribute social value to the public while doing social research and a practice of independence and resistance to algorithmic surveillance.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 22-10-2021
Publisher: Pluto Journals
Date: 2021
DOI: 10.13169/WORKORGALABOGLOB.15.1.0107
Abstract: This article investigates the lived experiences of remote workers during the Italian lockdown, and the role of digital platforms in their working and everyday life activities, as well as the consequences of home confinement measures on personal and working conditions. Drawing on 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews, the paper's findings suggest that, following a massive extension of transmedia work, remote workers experienced a ‘fractured’ and ‘always-on’ life. During the lockdown, the ever more pervasive role of digital media favoured the convergence of different spaces and times into the home, the erosion of the distinction between private and professional life and the exacerbation of previous social inequalities, especially inequalities in relation to gender and digital access. In this scenario, platform and surveillance capitalist logics were further reinforced, while ‘presence bleed’ in the experiences of workers increased.
No related grants have been discovered for Riccardo Pronzato.