Beyond personal safe spaces: Creating and maintaining collective environments for meaning and identity on digital platforms

Abstract

The transience of digital platforms poses obstacles for platform workers to create stable meaning and identity in online work environments. Extant literature concerned with work-related identity discusses gig-workers coping with the erosion of organizational structures in online spaces through “personalized holding environments”. We add to this literature by illustrating how actors maintain and create digital platforms as collective environments with the capacity for meaningfulness and identity formation. To do so, we draw on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between human activities in labor (serves necessities), work (creates things), and action (provides identity and meaning). Empirically, we autoetnographically investigated two digital platforms reflecting two prevalent narratives of the future of platform work: a platform dedicated to creative collaboration in an online community (FAWM) and a platform associated with precarious microtasking in the gig economy (MTurk). In both cases, we find that labor activities are required to maintain a digital identity and a digital environment. In turn, work activities establish a digital environment in a state of consistency, without ever adding tangible permanence to the human artifice. Thereupon, while establishing the digital platform as a stable collective environment, collective action (e.g. community building) can be performed. Here, we finally argue, lies the future human condition of platform work: in the ongoing care and creation of stable collective environments in a digital space lacking permanence.