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There is a new cast of self-proclaimed experts offering "how-to-succeed" resources aimed at coaching and inspiring gig workers. The emergence of such resources raises questions about the performance of expertise regarding the workings of algorithmic labor platforms. This article examines how Uber driver/bloggers—workers who are driving for Uber, while also creating Uber-related video content—perform expertise in driving for Uber on YouTube. I conducted in-depth interviews with 11 driver/bloggers and a qualitative analysis of the textual and video content published by driver/bloggers. Through the data, I show how driver/bloggers' empowerment narratives became intertwined with their individualistic aspirations to develop dual careers as Uber drivers and YouTubers. Driver/bloggers employed three self-presentation strategies to perform expertise, including the construction of uniqueness and "know-how," realness, and relatability with audiences. The study concludes with implications for our collective understandings of gig workers, expertise, and online curation across a wider platform ecology.

Drawing insights from the literature around cultural discourse theory, urban informality, and precarity, this article explores how a group of unlicensed hawkers in Hong Kong engage in a place-making process of precarity. Existing research on precarity has examined the structural change in the labor market in advanced economies and labor unions' collective resistance. Few empirical studies, however, have explicated how informal workers experience precarity in their everyday life. To contribute to this literature, therefore, this study examines how hawkers in Hong Kong constitute their class identities and the meanings of place while facing legal and spatial ambiguities on a daily basis. While interlocutors articulate different class identities, they constitute themselves as precarious beings through spatial practice. Rather than engaging in collective resistance against precarity, hawkers develop culturally distinctive practices to adapt to the power structure in which they operate. This article highlights the dialectical relationship between spatial practice and precarity as contextualizing precarity in developing Asia.

In 2018, Uber released an overhauled mobile application for its independent contractor workforce, who had become increasingly dissatisfied by the lack of autonomy, transparency, and flexibility while working on the platform. Based on the gamification of work, the application linked individualized rewards with Uber's need to maintain a frictionless marketplace. However, as recent studies of gig economy have revealed, workers resist gamified algorithmic management by developing work games. Our findings, based upon analysis of driver accounts of using Uber's application, presents a typology of player modes and work games that drivers play. We identified two distinctive player modes, grinding and oppositional play, which, respectively, illustrate how drivers consent and resist gamification. We also describe several work games that Uber drivers play in resistance to Uber's gamification. This study contributes to the understanding of how the (re)design of worker-facing apps shape the power dynamics underpinning platform-initiated algorithmic governance and worker-initiated games.

Space plays a vital role in structuring and forming social movements into particular shapes—especially via its physical settings, the representation constructed through dominant and alternative discourses, and protesters' spatial practices therein. Geographers and urban theorists have long argued that public space is of paramount significance to collective actions. Yet we know less about how a sustainable, manageable, and iconic public space for continuous movement mobilization is created. This article uses Victoria Park, an iconic public space of contention in Hong Kong, as a case to examine how a contentious political space is made. Through archival research, we demonstrate how the Defend Diaoyutai Islands Movement of the 1970s transformed the park from an "empty" recreational space to a political space. People's political actions made this transformation of the spatial order possible. Nonetheless, the British colonial government re-policed the spatial norms of the space, which in turn regulated both the government and protesters. The study affords significant opportunities for thinking about the spatial constraints of contentious politics.

Digital data have become a form of "objectivation", which affect how we construct social knowledge and organize social space (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). The workplace is one sphere that is increasingly datafied. This study explores how Uber drivers, a form of digitally-enabled service workers, contribute to the normalization of the social production of space through their interpretative practices of digital data in an online forum. Drawing on Uber's corporate discourse and an Uber driver online forum, we analyze two facets of the Uber app and drivers' mediated experiences: (1) the quantification and discipline of drivers' performance through Uber's rating system and (2) the coordination of spatial movement through location-related metrics. We argue that the underlying workings of the Uber app premediate expectations of service encounters and spatial movement. Uber drivers meanwhile develop practices which respond to and circumvent their own data contributions to the system. Drivers' practices, we argue, are largely in compliance with the calculative logics set by Uber. The article addresses implications of Uber drivers' practices for the reproduction of social space and power-relations in digitally-enabled service work and the gig economy.

Social movements are voluntary events whose participants have the right to leave whenever they disagree with their leaders. For this reason, the legitimacy of social movements is often perceived as inherent and thus of only secondary importance. This article aims to repudiate this view by demonstrating that legitimacy issues can impose constraints and have significant impacts on the relationships and decisions of the leaders of social movements. In the case of the Umbrella Movement, bottom-up legitimacy challenges to movement leaders' authority not only forced the leaders to reform their decision-making structure and even implement direct democracy, but also intensified the relationships among the leaders of different factions, ultimately undermining the leadership's overall effectiveness. (China Perspect/GIGA)

Social media users are routinely counseled to cultivate their online personae with acumen and diligence. But universal prescriptions for impression management may prove for vexing for college students, who confront oft-conflicting codes of normative self-presentation in digital contexts. Against this backdrop, our research sought to examine the online self-presentation activities of emerging adults (18–24) across an expansive social media ecology that included Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Twitter. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 28 Fcollege-aged youth, we highlight how the imagined surveillance of various social actors steered their self-presentation practices in patterned ways. After exploring three distinct responses to imagined surveillance—including the use of privacy settings, self-monitoring, and pseudonymous accounts (including "Finstas," or fake + Instagram)—we consider the wider implications of a cultural moment wherein users are socialized to anticipate the incessant monitoring of social institutions: family, educators, and above all, (future) employers.

Social media can establish governance frameworks for their users through public-facing documents and policies. Such governance frameworks are value-laden and embody platform values. As a newly dominant platform in the United States, TikTok serves as an exemplary medium to study the evolution of platform values. Based on the iterations of TikTok's Community Guidelines from 2018 to 2022 ( N = 25,641), we conducted longitudinal lexical analyses to determine changes in their structure and value salience. Then, through network analysis, we demonstrated how values co-exist by constructing co-occurrence networks. Our results reveal that the lexical complexity and value interconnection of these policies have increased over time. Certain values are more central in the networks than others (e.g. privacy, safety, and fairness), which may be attributed to a public outcry for change. The evolution of TikTok's governance frameworks follows three mechanisms (mediation, reversion, and founding paths) in shaping the core-periphery structures of platform values.

From smart devices to homes to cities, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have become embedded within everyday objects on a global scale. We understand IoT technologies as a form of infrastructure that bridges the gaps between offline spaces and online networks as they track, transmit, and construct digital data from and of the physical world. We examine the social construction of IoT network technologies through their technological design and corporate discourses. In this article, we explore the methodological challenges and opportunities of studying IoT as an emerging network technology. We draw on a case study of a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN), a cost-effective radio frequency network that is designed to connect sensors across long distances. Reflecting on our semi-structured interviews with LPWAN users and advocates, participant observation at conferences about LPWAN, as well as a community-based LPWAN project, we examine the intersections of methods and practices as related to space, data, and infrastructures. We identify three key methodological obstacles involved in studying the social construction of networked technologies that straddle physical and digital environments. These include (a) transcending the invisibility and abstraction of network infrastructures, (b) managing practical and conceptual boundaries to sample key cases and participants, and (c) negotiating competing technospatial imaginaries between participants and researchers. Through our reflection, we demonstrate that these challenges also serve as generative methodological opportunities, extending existing tools to study the ways data connects online and offline spaces.