Introduction
Social media use has been on a steady rise in recent years. Billions of people globally use digital platforms to make connections and share information. It has emerged to become part of the work for employees and top management. The platforms include virtual worlds, widgets, podcasts, video-sharing sites, instant messaging, photo-sharing sites, wikis, micro-blogs, blogs, and social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Drawing from the relevant parts of the course module reading list, this essay critically engages with the literature presented to develop an argument of how social media has impacted how individuals work. It will use real-world examples to provide evidence.
Work transformation
Digital innovations are transforming every facet of our lives, and the workplace in particular. The ability to cheaply and quickly exchange large volumes of information and data between devices, businesses, and individuals has laid the foundations for digital platforms and the digital economy. These dynamics extend to the world of work using digital products and services to users, including social networking sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook); platforms that facilitate the exchange of products and services (such as Alibaba, Flipkart, and Amazon) or electronic payment platforms (i.e. Payfast and Paytm) or B2B; and those that mediate labor exchange among workers including digital labor (such as Upwork and Uber). These digital footprints are redefining structures of economic exchange and have wrought changes to work processes. By connecting clients and businesses to employees, they shape labor processes (Udanor and Anyanwu, 2019).
Although social networking sites are only a decade old, they have transformed gig work that touches many aspects of economic life. “COVID-19 pandemic onset and subsequent lockdowns of cities led to a staggering spike in digital platforms usage.” (Nieborg et al., 2020). Millions of users have become more dependent on apps and platforms to work. Many employees were forced to work from home using video apps such as zoom and teleconferencing.
Most importantly, digital platforms have created a dual labor force with few workers employed directly by the platform while many workers whose work is platform-mediated are outsourced. In the first category, employees have a dependent work relationship, while workers in the latter are usually considered independent contractors or self-employed by a vast majority. They must pay different types of fees to access tasks. Employees working under employment relationships are responsible for the platform’s functioning and form a small fraction of the workforce (Udanor and Anyanwu, 2019). For example, PeoplePerHour, a freelance site, has about 60 workers but mediates work for over 2 million skilled employees. The platform’s terms and conditions regulate these employees’ working conditions, which determines workplace entitlements and protections.
Such networking sites have opened up other avenues of outsourcing work on the platforms, enabling businesses to access employees with a vast array of expertise and skills. This has facilitated different forms of businesses, from Fortune companies to start-ups which depend on online web-based platforms to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Some of these global companies have workers in emerging and developing countries, who account for over 20 per cent of the labor market.
According to Vallas and Schor (2020, p. 276), the emergence of these platforms has made some scholars claim that employment may be ground to a halt or lead to predatory platform capitalism. The taxonomy of labor platforms has rekindled work statuses. Today, the platforms represent a shift from closed to open employment. “Some of the social media platform-based organizations such as Uber and Airbnb have created a ready pool of workers, particularly recent graduates.” (Vallas and Schor, 2020, p. 281)
Evidence suggests that social networking sites enhance the formation of workers’ social capital characterized by shared trust, vision, and network ties, which ultimately facilitate the transfer of knowledge and influence work performance. “However, this new form of creative platforms is not without risks.” (Lin and De Kloet, 2019). They have led to absentee employees, reduced productivity at work, depression and anxiety, gossip, and harassment.
Labor platform
In essence, labor platforms are essential players in global and domestic labor markets. Social media platforms represent distinct economies that influence networks, hierarchies, and markets. Their unique characteristics reside within labor selection, evaluation, and control that service providers perform. Uber and Airbnb are just a decade old platform-based company. Although their emergence coincided with the 2008 recession, it created a new pool of workers who facilitated the companies’ expansion. They employed recent graduates who matched with the consumers who sought value. There has been a rapid growth in the digital platform economy as it now involves an array of digitally mediated economic transactions, including the exchange of products and services. Internally oriented information systems and public-facing websites are now the order of the day in many organizations through work performed (Lu and Dillahunt, 2021, p. 8). This has enhanced platform-like workstations in conventional firms since mobile devices and applications have become widespread. The impact is more palpable in the traditional economy. Born-digital companies such as Apple and Amazon use social media platforms to create new markets and usurp existing ones. Their platform economy entails social media firms such as Instagram and Facebook that subsist on advertising revenue and the sale of data. They also provide a working infrastructure on which the companies depend. The platform labor represents a strategically important branch of global capitalism due to the creative destruction in contemporary parlance.
Platform workers can be categorized into the nature of work done, skill levels, whether it is globally or locally dispersed, performed off- or online, and produced. These workers vary in skill levels, type of work performed off-line or online, globally or locally dispersed, and type of product produced (Lu and Dillahunt, 2021, p.9). Examples of workers who these digital footprints have impacted are technologists and architects, workers in the creative industry, and freelancers or cloud-based consultants. Technologists and architects design and maintain the digital infrastructures; hence, their labor products influence their occupational conditions. Employees in the creative industries can perform venture labor as they work long for long hours to generate substantial future wealth via acquisitions or initial public offerings. Freelancers can now offer professional services via platforms including Upwork. Cloud-based consultants can maintain a good client roster (Vallas and Schor, 2020, p. 285). Content creators working in the creative industry can sell their work online via Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube and earn a living.
Gig workers use platforms to perform tasks, such as care work, home repair, food delivery, and ride-hail services. There is a vast market for this business, including delivery, odd-job, and day-labor tasks. The arrangement accords the provider’s flexibility regarding autonomy and work schedules, a gain that firms usually advertise. However, employees must not only forego protections nor assume the risks and responsibility for operating costs but also conform to the customer demand temporal rhythms that substantially reduce their autonomy (Bizzi, 2018, p. 25).
Other platform work is performed online. This is termed micro-tasking such as workers in Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower) or Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). These workers undertake computer-aided tasks which are part of machine learning. These jobs need less experience and training than the work performed by freelancers and cloud-based consultants, such as classifying and describing image content, validating social media user accounts, transcribing brief audio clips, and editing computer-generated text. These jobs exist in social media penumbra and include influencers and content producers performing aspirational labor as often offered on an unpaid basis. Influencers and content creators usually hope to gain prominence in the highly advancing attention economy, ultimately earning a regular revenue.
According to Bizzi (2018, p. 28), micro-tasking entails a highly varied and large group of workers in the Global South and North who are priced under competitive conditions. Crowd-working websites have enormous potential to distribute work initially done in-house. Employees have a vision desirable future leading them to embrace highly insecure labor market positions. Workers are subjected to diverse employment conditions as demand and labor market dynamics vary globally. With these dynamics, technologists and architects are in chronically short supply while content producers and influencers suffer from excess supply. Employees stand in positions different from the platform architecture as architects serving as digital orthopedists, while micro-taskers are passive users or recipients of the platform’s affordances. Platform work varies over time due to the frequent changes in regulatory policy, market conditions, and algorithmic designs. These considerations offer ample reasons for practicing caution while generalizing the organization’s nature and platform work.
Sharing economy
Sharing platform refers to peer-to-peer digital footprints that mobilize idle resources. Emphasis has been long laid on crowd-sourced ratings and algorithmic information to foster trust and reduce transaction costs, enabling peers to work in these new markets. This has led to a workplace revolution as platforms provide many opportunities for employees over the traditional corporate form (Yang et al., 2021, p. 103462). They reduce bureaucratic intermediaries, eliminate stumbling blocks constraining participation in the labor force, such as caregivers, persons with disabilities, and rural residents, and reduce transaction costs. Kim and Scott (2019) argue that social media platforms can amass participants’ reputational scores as they foster trust among potential transactors. Thus, rigidities regarding workers’ welfare in the corporate economy have receded in favor of egalitarian crowd-based capitalism. In this structure, hierarchies do not represent economic activity. Notably, employment relation has lost their lustre in the wake of the networked society.
A significant indicator of this shift can be attributed to many workers who can afford choice and flexibility uncommon in conventional jobs. In-network effects presence, these platforms can dominate and scale markets, gaining monopoly power that can be used to dictate exchange conditions in their labor markets. Holland et al. (2019, p. 76) postulate that employees may be shared or milked to extract revenue. Industrial Sociology suggests that workers usually develop tactics to subvert, defy, or evade assembly line dictates. This has been severely attacked by digital platforms, which encode workplace regulations and rules that workers use to complete tasks. However, evidence reveals that social media platforms reduce employees’ capacity to challenge, elude, or resist expectations and rules that firms develop as participation conditions.
Platforms have aided this in multiple ways (Wood, 2020, p. 47). First, they generate data about internal operations but unevenly share the information creating information asymmetries within the organization. For instance, some platforms withhold critical information that reduces worker income and autonomy. Data collected from these platforms also enable the management to specify and develop new work rules. For instance, employers dictate jobs that employees must unconditionally accept, time that they must be available, and performance targets. Consequently, the labor process has become less legible to employees than employers.
Second, these platforms not only depend on the calculative control mechanisms that metrics can afford but also on normative structures, including symbolic rewards, games and other incentives that foster user attachment to the platform using engineered tactics called soft biopolitics. Third, platforms individualize human labor, depriving employees of their relational spaces and hence cannot challenge managerial authority (Oksa et al., 2020). Lastly, encompassing a pool of workers strengthens competitive relations on crowd-working sites and bidding sites such as TaskRabbit and freelancer platforms.
Some of the social media platforms that have converged processes and created a platform economy in China are Wechat and Taobao. Data-based digital technologies like Kuaishou offer workers a high connectivity degree allowing them to mediate between employers and customers. These social networking sites offer unemployed and marginalized people opportunities to become self-employed.
Studies indicate that employees have developed resistance to technologies (Jue et al., 2009). For instance, UpWork freelancers have identified ways to defeat the site’s metrics and form online client alliances to outdo the performance evaluation system. They have also come up with ways of manipulating the system by feeding it data and evading surveillance. Uber ride-hail drivers have solidary ties to control their labor power supply and price (Davison et al., 2018, p. 229). Such tactics have gained traction recently, with studies indicating that employees owned multiple phones or bots to subvert work algorithms.
The role of social media and online forums in organizing these tasks shows that they offer surrogate solidarity. What remains unclear is whether social media–enabled protests will engage many workers. Labor platforms represent a dramatic rupture or break with prior forms of economic activity and work for the organization. The social media revolution is a continuation of structural dynamics that point to the declining work arrangement standards, a normative ideal that promises full-time, secure work with maximum wage benefits. Firms have been able to externalize risks that they were initially compelled to shoulder. The effect was to dis-embed employees from social protection systems and commodify labor time. The platforms offer readily available infrastructure that limits the organization’s obligation to the workforce they rely on. Thus, digital footprints accumulate through dispossession (using financial and legal systems to uproot economic rights previously enjoyed by workers) (Davison et al., 2018, p. 231).
Despite the long-standing protections, including worker compensation, health insurance, retirement income, health and safety regulation, and minimum wage, platform employees assume levels and forms of risks initially shouldered by the state and employers. They avoid bearing the brunt of employment risks and costs devolved onto workers. Such assets and tools damage, bodily injury, paid gig coverage, customer financial malfeasance, and harassment (Men and Tsai, 2013, p. 17). Virtual employees bear the costs of lost earnings and inadequate demand and are subjected to deactivation when customers rate them poorly based on attendant services.
Social media platforms are touted to facilitate democratic participation in the firm’s governance by adopting digital affordances within collective bargaining organizations. With sufficient institutional guidance, these platforms provide an avenue for employees to voice social inclusion. They retain authority over tasks such as activity allocation, data collection, services pricing, and revenue collection. Digital footprints provide open employment relations by relinquishing control over these processes, significantly relaxing criteria for personnel selection and accords employees considerable independence over how and when to work often (Chiu et al., 2009, p. 800). Interestingly, employees place a high premium on them than their bosses.
However, labor platforms represent a highly dynamic and nascent economic dynamic characterized by instability that cannot be foreseen. Social media platforms also make employees cede control over others, including control over work schedules, work methods specification, and evaluation of labor performance. Furthermore, as evident in ride-hail and delivery, they may become permissive predators as employers exploit the labor force using their power. By reducing employment entry barriers, the platforms enhance orientations in work variation, positions in the labor market, and employees’ sociodemographic composition. Platforms introduce sharp disparities among workers in platform participation and support for regulatory interventions. For example, their supervision via suggested work practices and geolocation monitoring in ride-hail and delivery. There is a marked absence of scripting, routinization, and formal rules of direct imposition. According to Men and Tsai (2013, p. 19), employees have been informally forced to negotiate their performances with customers, usually developing more relational bonds. This is why employees using platform labor perform highly individualized tasks that do not involve direction from the company.
This is not to say that firms do not have control mechanisms. For instance, Handy’s labor service platform control employees using fees. In addition, some highly skilled freelancers and crowd-workers are subjected to surveillance technology which performs periodic screenshots to manage keystrokes. However, there is a considerable variation in the efficacy of these monitoring tactics as they are easily circumvented as employees get more experienced. Employees are exposed to mechanisms that limit their autonomy. These mechanisms rely on the external environment in hierarchical regimes. Since workers can choose how and when to work, they depend on the labor market’s disciplinary power rather than its hierarchical authority. This provides limited forms of autonomy and exposes workers to evaluative infrastructure.
Digital platforms are characterized by the spatial organization of work which concentrates labor at the point of production (Zhang et al., 2019). Cloud-based digital intermediaries have reversed this organization by effectively deploying labor. For instance, Ride-hailing drivers must strategically position themselves close to each other to offer just-in-time service to customers. For clients to access a vast labour pool, they must source crowd-workers globally. Such spatial dispersion has two impacts: first, workers are torn between increasingly competitive and unequal relationships with each other, and second, this dispersion creates individualization that undermines workers’ collective action capacity. It may also result in social isolation. The digitally-incentivized sharing economy reduces employees’ opportunities for a shared work experience. Taking control over the working hours, labor process, and effort increases legal challenges and reduces digital platforms’ ability to attract labor (Zhang et al., 2019; Vallas and Schor, 2020, p. 282). Furthermore, it subjects digital platforms to labor shortages. The labor platform may also weaken standard employment, creating a vicious circle that erodes employment quality.
A study on labor market digitization had the same findings. For instance, LinkedIn formulates rules that govern user profiles and limit job seekers’ autonomy while maximizing employers’ discretion. This pattern reflects the employer’s concentrated power and a source of revenue for LinkedIn. The findings also suggest that labor platform-based algorithms reproduce class, racial, and other workplace biases within platforms and firms. Furthermore, the automated hiring and selection platforms highly consider job applicants that fit the preexisting past hires profiles with an aura of predictive rationality and digital objectivity—customer-sourced metrics subject platform employees to algorithmic discrimination by race, ethnicity, and gender.
Platformization of work
Zhang et al. (2019) posit that the traditional way of doing work is becoming outdated. Modern technological and almost ubiquitous digital advances and internet connectivity have significantly changed the way organizations and employees work. Businesses reap huge benefits from increased workplace digitization via cost savings, increased productivity, and a more agile and mobile workforce. While employers have received a boom, the power balance between employee-employer relationships has changed, often emphasizing the employee. Platformization of work has enabled enterprises to collaborate and stay connected with peers and up-to-date with digital trends (Vallas and Schor, 2020, p. 287).
As networks and technology use becomes more robust, consumers’ computing power increases. Workers are more comfortable working using their devices than in face-to-face or in-office meetings. Employees across countries and time zones can remotely work with their teams through cloud-stored files, email, VoIP, and Skype. Today, businesses no longer send workers on costly trips to collaborate with teams or visit clients (Vallas and Schor, 2020, p. 276). Social and technical mobility decouples organizations and people from defined markets and physical geography.
Access to resources in skill has made vertical movements easier. Companies can create “on-demand” digitally integrated teams, tapping into extensive innovators networks, technical expertise, and seasoned professionals globally who can collaborate. It is estimated that 20% to 30% of the global workforce is contingent (Nieborg et al., 2020). Contingent workers create agility for businesses of all sizes. The new cognitive technologies are reengineering work as it augments tedious and slow work. Most importantly, cognitive technologies have created new jobs as they allowed the analysis of the datasets previously unheard-of years ago. Employees with deep analytical skills and data science have immensely gained from these labor trends.
This increase in virtual connectedness and communications has opened new ways of collecting, managing, and developing work and talent, changing how work is sourced and distributed. The platforms have also changed people’s perceptions of work and working culture, and overall work. Managing a global talent pool, which is constantly in flux depending on needs, requires the ability to manage and mine large employee and business data pools.
As earlier mentioned, many freelancers have evolved over the past decade. They allow firms and workers to access, analyze, rank and review millions of data on individual workers, projects, and tasks. This accords employees with a new power dimension. Because current, potential, and contingent workers have access to technology and data, they can learn how to utilize it to their benefit maximumly.
A growing group of younger, tech-savvy, and highly connected workers are managing work outside the conventional categories that have for long defined the workforce (Nieborg et al., 2020). These workers have redefined their focus on work-life integration, purpose, and mission. They digitally stay connected to family and friends. More workers are demanding work-life balance to accommodate more time for their families, living away from city centers. For them, work balance involves using digital platforms to achieve their broader goals.
Conventionally, business executives and human resource personnel thought of employee processes and talent as a supply chain with an off-ramp for retirees and an on-ramp for new hires. However, today’s workers are mobile and nimbler to attain their desired career goals. Facilitating workers with digital tools offer flexibility for enterprise and employees. The shift has adjusted the corporate culture and impacted how people think and communicate at work. Platformization of labor has also resulted in a casual attitude between bosses and co-working peers (Lin and De Kloet, 2019). For instance, many employees do not think twice when they see a WhatsApp emoji included in an email from a colleague they have never met.
Workplace challenges in the face of digital platforms
Digital technologies have created a divide between employees’ preferences to the reality of their workplace. It is not easy to attain work-life balance in a world where lines between life and work are ill-defined, and a mobile phone is within arm’s reach. Digital technologies and capabilities have gained a foothold ahead of employees than the traditional work culture (Lu and Dillahunt, 2021, p. 10). These digital platforms have increasingly become addictive for some workers. They may work for long workers while always being “on,” which slows down the overall productivity. Humans globally are overwhelmed by their digital abilities and hence may not control or limit the technology they consume and how it infiltrates their lives (Bizzi, 2018, p. 26).
Modern employees work for longer hours and are continuously connected to work by pervasive digital technologies. Sometimes, they may demand cross-functional teams that rapidly bring diverse people together, making it hard to create collaborative and cohesive teams. Also, digital etiquette issues can be created for staff and clients. If unresolved, these issues may result in employee burnout as workers cannot fully disengage from work or feel tracked by the organization.
In addition, many millennials have experienced workplace instability, with two economic downturns (Wood, 2020, p. 55): when businesses close down due to finance and data mishandling and an abrupt ending during their careers. Businesses live in an era whereby corporate decisions are immediately debated and exposed through social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor. Once-private issues are exposed to the public, an organization’s reputation and employees may be jeopardized. This may become its competitive weakness.
The use of digital platforms in the workplace has raised multiple concerns regarding internal governance, compensation for device usage, regulatory compliance, and data security (Yang et al., 2021, p. 24). This is a menace for all employees and enterprises. Whether one is working as an “on-demand” employee, a business is responsible for creating secure data among workers. The evolving regulatory environment challenges incorporating and adopting digital platforms into the workplace. For instance, in the healthcare sector, privacy requires additional security and governance to develop digital programs that are more complex. Other barriers in medicine include differences in medical practitioners’ digital proficiencies and how patients communicate and receive information from their caregivers.
According to Davison et al. (2018, p. 227), some traditional companies still find it hard to get employees who prefer “old-fashioned” methods like in-person meetings or phone calls to adopt new digital methods to work. It is equally tricky to develop a sound digital working culture that aligns and strikes with the organization’s culture. Even with the advances in technology, some employers do not technically allow remote working. Workers in these organizations use unofficial communication methods, such as using Slack, Facebook groups, and texting.
Conclusion
From the analysis, it is palpable that social media platforms’ impact on work is here for the long haul. Compounded with the COVID-19 pandemic, they have transformed work to unprecedented levels as employees become more dependent on apps and platforms to work. There is a shift from closed to open employment that the platforms represent. Examples of workers who these digital footprints have impacted are technologists and architects, workers in the creative industry, and freelancers or cloud-based consultants. These sites enhance the formation of employee social capital characterized by shared trust and vision and network ties that induce work performance and knowledge transfer. However, they may also lead to low employee productivity and efficiency.
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