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This article investigates the lived experiences of remote workers during the Italian lockdown, and the role of digital platforms in their working and everyday life activities, as well as the consequences of home confinement measures on personal and working conditions. Drawing on 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews, the paper's findings suggest that, following a massive extension of transmedia work, remote workers experienced a ‘fractured’ and ‘always-on’ life. During the lockdown, the ever more pervasive role of digital media favoured the convergence of different spaces and times into the home, the erosion of the distinction between private and professional life and the exacerbation of previous social inequalities, especially inequalities in relation to gender and digital access. In this scenario, platform and surveillance capitalist logics were further reinforced, while ‘presence bleed’ in the experiences of workers increased.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a further extension of the sociotechnical logics of digital platforms to every realm of social life. Given the colonialist, oppressive and exploitative dynamics through which digital platforms work, several scholars supported the need to embrace an openly activist role to help individuals contrast the ways in which they are trapped in loops of dependency and trajectorism. Drawing on the results of 40 auto-ethnographic diaries, this paper showcases the usefulness of critical pedagogical techniques in enhancing critical awareness regarding hegemonic datafication structures, while also arguing that despite a good level of consciousness raising, it remains difficult for people to go beyond subalternity and make more concrete changes in personal and collective behaviors. We contend that to break persistent feelings of dependency, it is necessary to go further with a two-step process combining autoethnographic tools, aimed at increasing critical algorithmic awareness, with the development of data science skills that can help individuals acquiring more precise knowledge schemes and scaling down the power of giant corporations, thereby building individual and collective capacities to use data for developing counter-narratives about possible futures.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how the measures of social distancing and home confinement have been perceived and experienced in the Italian socio-cultural context, how they reshaped everyday life and which are their social implications.Design/methodology/approachThe study was exploratory and interpretative in nature and a qualitative research design was adopted accordingly. A total of 60 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted.FindingsResearch findings highlight the fact that the boundaries of everyday practices have been completely reframed during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Italy. Informants show that scarcity of personal spaces, intertwined with the collapse of the boundaries between private and professional life, and also the lack of physical contact, resulted in a complex management of different social roles and in a stress overload.Originality/valueThere are no prior studies that critically analyse the lived experiences of individuals during the lockdown and the impact of home confinement on their meaning-making processes. This paper sheds light on the reframing of everyday life, thereby enhancing our understanding of a novel issue that is of primary concern for social scientists.

The ubiquity of digital platforms has progressively restructured everyday life, as individuals are embedded within a structure of permanent connectivity and surveillance. A growing literature is exploring how digital platforms play a fundamental role in consolidating platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017). Spreading across the production and reproduction of social life, digital platforms have come to significantly re-mediate social relationships and organizational processes. Digital platforms have colonized multiple areas of social life and remodelled social relations. These trends are likely to accelerate due to the COVID-19 emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a serious threat to the global economy as containment measures have been imposed to limit human mobility. At the same time, a distinction between essential and non-essential productive activities has been imposed and a new division in labour composition emerged between so called remote working and place-based jobs. In the lockdown context, people experienced the hyper-dependence of sociality on private digital platforms, creating what Van Dijck et al. (2018) call a platform society. Social space, everyday life, and everyday communication have changed. The workplace and the home have converged: the boundaries between leisure time and labour time, the office and the home, have become blurred. For many people, this tendency has meant an increase of their labour time and the necessity to manage multiple social roles at the same time in one location. Indeed, during the coronavirus crisis, many different times, spaces and social roles converged in the home. This period also highlighted again the relevance of digital literacy and of the inequalities connected with the use of digital technologies. Moreover, individuals were forced to act within the affordances of platforms designed and owned by a few private companies.