Event overview
'Putting platform labor in its place: The market for social media engagements in Indonesia and beyond' by Professor Johan Lindquist.
The Graduate School and MCCS Digital Culture Unit are delighted to be welcoming Professor Johan Lindquist from the University of Stockholm to deliver the spring term keynote lecture titled 'Putting platform labor in its place: The market for social media engagements in Indonesia and beyond'. The lecture will be taking place on campus and will be followed by a reception/ postgraduate researcher social.
This talk takes networked actors in Indonesia, who sell “fake” social media engagements such as Instagram followers, as an entry-point for describing and conceptualizing the organization of a transnational market. A mixed methods approach that tacks back and forth between ethnography and digital methods has identified a critical dimension of the market for social media engagements, a transnational ecosystem of so-called panels–automated and networked reseller websites that profit through arbitrage–which generally appear as cottage industries run by small groups of young men around the world. Interviews and ethnographic observations reveal a fast-moving and cut-throat transnational market that allows for easy entry, a particularly compelling opportunity for digitally-savvy youth who lack easy access to jobs in the global south, but are able to recruit kin and friends as workers. Digital methods, in turn, allow us to outline transnational networked relations. More generally, this talk will describe how platform labor must be approached as an interface between global ecosystems and socio-historically situated forms of labor, and that beginning in the global south, at the fringes of social media platforms, offers a productive entry point for reconsidering current research agendas.
Johan Lindquist is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, a member of the editorial board of Pacific Affairs, has published articles in journals such as Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Mobilities, Public Culture, Pacific Affairs, and International Migration Review, is the co-editor of Who’s Cashing in? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (Berghahn, 2020) and Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), the author of The Anxieties of Mobility: Development and Migration in the Indonesian Borderlands (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), and the director of B.A.T.A.M. (DER, 2005). His research interests include migration, Indonesia, digital labor, and methodology.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 18 Mar 2024 | 3:00pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
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