Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age

An examination of the ways that digital technologies play an increasingly important role in the lives of precarious workers, far beyond the gig economy apps like Uber and Lyft.Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Ch. 1 The Digital Hustle Ch. 2 After Access Ch. 3 Comparative Advantages Ch. 4 Suspending the Hustle Conclusion: Beyond Inclusion Methodological Appendix Reference

About the Author :
Julia Ticona is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research investigates the ways that digital communication technologies shape the meaning and dignity of precarious work. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Data & Society Research Institute, and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. In 2017, she collaborated on an amicus brief on behalf of Data & Society for Carpenter vs. U.S. before the US Supreme Court. Her work appears in The New York Times, The Nation, Wired, Slate, Dissent, Jezebel, Fast Company, and NPR's All Things Considered.

Review :
...this book contains an excellent and detailed methodological appendix, making it particularly useful to readers who focus on labor or qualitative social science research. This is a rare book about media technology that puts people first. Through its stirring prose we see how real people manage data and connectivity in their lives. We get a better sense of the consequences and opportunities of widespread dependence on phones and apps. Through the experiences of both low and high-wage workers trying to hustle in today's economy, Left to Our Own Devices brilliantly resists political logics that presume tech is a luxury. Ticona's compelling ethnographic account of workers' lives is an essential read for understanding modern precarity. This eminently readable, impressive book, based on outstanding fieldwork with precarious workers, deserves to be widely read. Julia Ticona provides a lucid and nuanced account of how such work requires the 'digital hustle' as technologies are not only essential tools in piecing together paid gigs but are also integral to insecure workers' sense of dignity. Left to Our Own Devices is an important look into the digital divide at work and the 'hidden similarities and uncomfortable differences' of economic class. Ticona's sharp analysis teaches readers about the painful realities of both high- and low-wage workers being left to navigate precarious jobs with the tools and tech that they have at hand. The result is a book that shows the future of work, today: a logic fuelled by society's worst stereotypes when, as this book argues, our economic futures are tied tightly together. Left to Our Own Devices will, no doubt, become a groundbreaking book for several disciplinary conversations around the future of work. Drawing on hundreds of interviews of independent workers, beyond the world of ridesharing apps that, otherwise, dominate press and scholarly conversations, Ticona, instead, offers a rare line-of-site into the lives of people picking up algorithmically managed jobs and how they negotiate privacy and the social boundaries between work and home. Her thinking and writing on the nexus of power she analyzes is nothing less than sublime, crafting a new, much needed path of inquiry. Left to Our Own Devices is a highly accessible and thought-provoking book that sits nicely alongside other recent contributions that unfold socio-digital inequalities through a meso-level or middle-range theorization...This book therefore paves the way for future research on comparative labor, technology, and inequality studies in variegated socio-economic contexts, as well as cross-national juxtapositions that are still relatively underexplored in the literature. It is undoubtedly a relevant material for anyone interested in socio-digital inequalities, 'the present' of work, as well as the possible future of work life with dignity, autonomy, and self-worth.