Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

What We See and What We Miss: Offline/Online Ethnography and Platform Workers

About

This talk reflects on my transition from traditional to digital ethnography, situating personal research experiences within broader debates in ethnographic theory.

 

As an ethnographic sociologist, I was trained in the tradition of Michael Burawoy. I was always interested in worker struggles both in and outside of factories and other workspaces. This informed my earlier research among South and South-East Asian migrant workers in the factories of Ansan, South Korea. In 2020, two simultaneous occurrences, however, launched me into the world of digital ethnography. The first – the Covid-19 pandemic – is familiar to many would-be digital ethnographers. But I had also started a project on Korean indie musicians at that time – creative workers whose labour was difficult to fully grasp unless one followed them on and through the many different digital platforms they employed to try to make a living. Therefore, I also needed to adapt digital ethnography.

 

More recently, I have returned to my interest in precarious migrant work. Rather than factory workers in South Korea, however, I conducted participant observation on migrant delivery riders in the Netherlands. My talk will focus on how this case study exemplifies the need to combine offline with online work. This is probably true for every research topic today: we all live our lives seamlessly moving between the online and the offline. I think platform delivery work provides us with an extreme form of this blended reality.

 

It also demonstrates what we miss if we focus only – or too heavily – on either the offline or the online. Platform delivery riders are managed through an online app. While this app governs their movements through urban space (in rain, sleet, and snow), they never actually settle anywhere in physical space. While working, I often passed other riders. However, it was extremely difficult to locate groups of riders as I raced from one end of Groningen to the other because there was no place to meet or to hang out. We just raced past each other.

 

As we all know, reconstruction of reality and theory form part of the main aims of ethnography (Waters 2011, Burawoy 2009). In particular, it is important to situate interviews within specific institutional contexts. This is necessary to explore not only what people say, but also to understand their experiences and relationships with other people. Therefore, participant observation is the heart of ethnographic research. My participation as a Thuisbezorgd (Dutch brand of Just Eat) delivery rider taught me much, but in order to observe other riders, I had to move online. I did this by joining several online forums. This is where riders gathered to chat, joke, and complain. Scrolling through posts, the rhythms and temporalities of engaging with other riders online were very different from the rhythms and temporalities of my offline work. It allowed me to see and understand certain things, but obscured others at the same time.

 

In this talk, I will reflect on these differences and what I would have missed out on if I had only conducted one side of this fundamentally two-sided offline/online project.