Abstract
From the global spread of the infectious disease COVID-19, in Argentina as in other states worldwide, health measures, social emergency, economic and public order measures were taken. One of the main and earliest measures of social order in the face of this disease was the delimitation of a period of population isolation, known as preventive and obligatory social isolation. The compulsory social isolation generated unprecedented growth in the demand for services to the platform economies in Argentina in general and in Buenos Aires in particular, causing the platform delivery activity to be conceived as an essential activity. The purpose of the writing is to explore the configuration of a certain politics of sensibilities that is used as a reproduction transport by digital delivery platforms in the city of Buenos Aires, during the isolation that the COVID-19 pandemic led to. From a process of digital ethnography, the main web pages and applications for smartphones of the firms are registered to problematize the information built from the notions of platform and politics of sensibilities.
TopThe 21st century brought with it a set of digital transformations that constitute the so-called era of society 4.0 of revolution 4.0. The concept of Society 4.0 refers to the economic and social processes that were structured from the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, around the global massification of new information technologies. Among the main elements of Society 4.0 are the appearance of Big Data and the handling of large amounts of information about people at the mercy of companies; and the emergence of an Economy of Orders, which promoted new forms of labor through digital platforms
As the previous backdrop, the new millennium evinces the predatory expansion of capitalism on a planetary scale (see Schumpeter), and the consequent manifestation of a series of changes and transformations in social processes on a world scale; among them: the large-scale increase in the use of the Internet and mobile devices, digital work and the new political economy of morality. In that way, the notion of “digital capitalism” expresses that the social changes that have been brewing show continuities regarding the basic relationships of economic exploitation, cultural alienation, and political domination (Van den Ecker and Sevignani, 2020).
According to We Are Social & Hootsuite (2020), more and more people are spending more time doing their things online. As of January 2020, the number of people around the world using the Internet grew to 4.54 million, an increase of 7 per cent (298 million new users) compared to January 2019. On the other hand, globally, more than 5.19 billion people now use mobile phones, with a 124 million (2.4 per cent) increase in the number of users during 2019.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Platform Sensibilities: Cognitive-affective social practices that occur in and through social networks as vehicles for the production and reproduction of a capitalist regime. They are characterized by being immediate in different senses.
Digital Ethnography: Qualitative method developed with the advances of the internet.
Society 4.0: Economic and social processes around the global massification of new information technologies in the 21 st century.
Politics of Sensibilities: Set of cognitive-affective social practices that tend to produce, manage, and reproduce horizons of action, disposition, and cognition.
Digital Consumption: Social organizer’s practices in 21 st century society. This practice implies the production and reproduction of life, ways of experiencing, being in the world and being with others.