Curious encounters: the social consolations of digital platform work in the gig economy

Abstract

This paper explores interpersonal encounters between workers and consumers who use gig economy apps to investigate how urban sociality is changing. It responds to calls for geographic research on planned, technologically mediated encounters to better discern how digital technologies are impacting patterns of sociality. Acknowledging the diversity of relations with multiple others that happen via digital platforms, our paper is concerned with an affirmative sociality associated with curiosity. Through fieldwork encounters with workers in Melbourne’s gig economy, our paper draws out three different configurations of social curiosity: wonder, enchantment and empathy. Though curiosity sparked by..