Encountered by mobile money professionals – industry and philanthropic actors seeking to bring mobile phone‐enabled financial products to poor people in the ‘developing world’ – the authors move together with new collaborators to inquire into a problem they had been grappling with for some time. This is the problem of agency; specifically, the agency of ‘mobile money agents’, the people ‘on the ground’ or ‘in the field’ who form a crucial function in permitting others to put cash into an electronic money transfer system and pull cash out of it. These ‘human ATMs’ or ‘bridges to cash’ become the object of analytical scrutiny for mobile money experts and anthropologists. This article takes that analytical scrutiny – and not mobile money agents themselves – as its object. It seeks to understand how ‘agency’ inflects debates over money, its meaning and its pragmatics, and its transformation in new communicative infrastructures, and how it might inform anthropology and political struggles over money and payment.
This article examines the significance of digital gaming culture amidst broader institutional transformations in South Korea over the past several decades. Digital gaming is contextualized by a popular narrative about Korean society "speeding up" and complementary sociotemporal expectations for being and acting that stress qualities of both quickness and endurance. Approaching digital gaming's virtual-and actual-world sites as nested "taskscapes," I contend that calibration-processes that bring phenomena across different taskscapes into correspondence with one another-best describes how Korean digital gamers align their individual, embodied play with sociotemporal expectations. Specifically, I analyze two digital gaming practices in their ethnographic contexts-an e-sports performance metric called "actions per minute" (APM) and an online gaming activity known as nogada-as modes for calibrating play with dominant sociotemporalities. The contrast between quick and slow sociotemporalities and the necessity of continual recalibration across taskscapes is a source of unending stress and frustration for many Koreans. Thinking with play as a disposition for calibration helps to make sense of everyday strategies for making do in precarious circumstances. [digital games, temporality, play, South Korea] RESUMEN Este artículo examina el significado de la cultura de juego digital en medio de transformaciones institucionales más amplias en Corea del Sur en lasúltimas décadas El juego digital está contextualizado por una narrativa popular acerca de la sociedad Coreana de "acelerándose" y expectativas socio-temporales complementarias por ser y actuar que enfatizan las cualidades de rapidez y resistencia. Aproximando los sitios virtuales y del mundo actual de juego virtual como "paisajes de tareas" anidados, afirmo que la calibración -procesos que traen fenómenos a través de diferentes paisajes de tareas en correspondencia uno con el otro-describen mejor cómo los jugadores digitales coreanos alinean su juego individual, corpóreo con expectativas socio-temporales. Específicamente, analizo dos prácticas de juego digital en sus contextos etnográficos -una métrica de rendimiento de deportes electrónicos (e-sports) llamada 'acciones por minuto" (APM), y una actividad de juego en línea conocida como nogada-como modos para calibrar el juego con socio-temporalidades dominantes. El contraste entre socio-temporalidades rápidas y lentas y la necesidad de una recalibración continua a través de paisajes de tareas es una fuente de estrés y frustración interminables para muchos coreanos. Pensando con juego como una disposición para la calibración ayuda a dar sentido a las estrategias cotidianas para salir adelante en circunstancias precarias. [juegos digitales, temporalidad, juego, Corea del Sur] . "" . '(taskscapes)' .
Crowdsourcing platforms are powerful tools for academic researchers. Proponents claim that crowdsourcing helps researchers quickly and affordably recruit enough human subjects with diverse backgrounds to generate significant statistical power, while critics raise concerns about unreliable data quality, labor exploitation, and unequal power dynamics between researchers and workers. We examine these concerns along three dimensions: methods, fairness, and politics. We find that researchers offer vastly different compensation rates for crowdsourced tasks, and address potential concerns about data validity by using platform-specific tools and user verification methods. Additionally, workers depend upon crowdsourcing platforms for a significant portion of their income, are motivated more by fear of losing access to work than by specific compensation rates, and are frustrated by a lack of transparency and occasional unfair treatment from job requesters. Finally, we discuss critical computing scholars’ proposals to address crowdsourcing’s problems, challenges with implementing these resolutions, and potential avenues for future research.
Computational systems, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics, are not only inescapable parts of social life but are also reshaping the contours of law and legal practice. We propose turning more law and social science (LSS) attention to new technological developments through the study of "law in computation," that is, computational systems' integration with regulatory and administrative procedures, the sociotechnical infrastructures that support them, and their impact on how individuals and populations are interpellated through the law. We present a range of cases in three areas of inquiry -algorithmic governance, jurisdiction and agency -on issues such as immigration enforcement, data sovereignty, algorithmic warfare, biometric identity regimes, and gig economies, for which examining law in computation illuminates how new technological systems' integration with legal processes pushes the distinction between "law on the books" and "law in action" into new domains. We then propose future directions and methods for research. As computational systems become ever more sophisticated, understanding the law in computation is critical not only for LSS scholarship, but also for everyday civics.
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