Information-technologies are essential for global capitalism to function at speed across scale, space and complexity. The importance of software and algorithms in the governance of these systems is reflected in the attention of scholars to the ways digital code and materiality (re)combine to...

This article evaluates the job quality of work in the remote gig economy. Such work consists of the remote provision of a wide variety of digital services mediated by online labour platforms. Focusing on workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the article draws on semi-structured...

This article presents findings regarding collective organisation among online freelancers in middle-income countries. Drawing on research in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, we find that the specific nature of the online freelancing labour process gives rise to a distinctive form of...

Corporations, development organisations and governments have launched ambitious programmes to ‘connect the unconnected', reasoning that this creates economic growth and inclusive development. This paper contrasts these actors' discourses with evidence from academic research. The evidence...

The Internet is frequently touted as the engine of a new revolution that can eliminate poverty and bring prosperity to producers of crafts and commodities in economically impoverished areas of the world. ‘E-Commerce’, ‘Commodity chains’, the ‘digital divide’, and...

Information is the raw material for much of the work that goes on in the contemporary global economy, and there are few people and places that remain entirely disconnected from international and global economic processes (Castells 1996). Information, and ultimately knowledge, is the carrier for...

Academia and the networks of knowledge and information that it is embedded in are changing. This response highlights three areas of concern within the coming-togethers of social media and geography. First, although blogs can create the fissures in media/social constellations, they more often...

Search has assumed a position of central importance in the way that people access and use online information and services. In this introduction we summarize the four articles constituting this themed section, and in so doing explore the ascendancy of search, the power it bestows upon those who...

The production of silk occupies a unique place in Thai cultural and economic practices. However, the practice is rarely passed on to the younger generation and is widely considered to be a dying craft. In response, influential organizations have proposed use of the internet as a way to...

East Africa has traditionally been characterised by stark barriers to non-proximate communication and flows of information (Castells, 1998). It was the world’s last major region without fibre-optic broadband internet access, and until the summer of 2009 had been forced to rely on slow and...