Documents Internet 430 results

"The contributions of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and social media to the climate crisis are often underestimated. To date, much of the focus has been on direct emissions associated with the life cycle of tech products. In this forum article, we argue that this narrow focus misses the adverse and indirect impacts of generative AI and social media on the climate. We outline some of the indirect ways in which generative AI and social media undermine the optimism, focus, creativity, and veracity required to address the climate crisis. Our aim is twofold. First, we seek to balance the tide of optimism about the role of digitalization in addressing the climate crisis by offering a skeptic's perspective. Second, we outline a new research agenda that moves beyond counting directly attributable carbon emissions and proposes a more comprehensive accounting of the indirect ways in which social media and generative AI adversely impact the sociopolitical conditions required to address the climate crisis."

"Digital platform labor and its complex relationship with capital have stirred scholarly inquiry, calling for a systemic review that bridges foundational theories and various currents of development. In this review, we revisit Marxist and autonomist Marxist theses on the changing nature of work in the platform economy. Following that, we review two major strands of studies on the organization of production at the macro level and labour control at the micro level, which have revealed variegated types of workplace fissuring and different techniques of algorithmic control over bodies. However, we argue that the path forward must transcend these boundaries. We call for a revival of the ‘social factory' thesis to rekindle ‘networking' as a way of understanding labor-capital relations on digital platforms. Our premise is that capital and labor mutually constitute the platform economy through their agency of networking the internet and ‘outernet'. We outline four key directions for future research based on this premise: networking with public elements, networking with market-driven elements, networking for financialization in the digital landscape, and networking for resistance. By reinvigorating the social factory approach, we aim to enrich scholarly understandings of labor-capital relations in the platform economy by articulating digital labor in a wider web of sociocultural, technical, political and economic relationships extending beyond and transcending the internet."
This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Introduction:
The internet of things (IoT) is increasingly used for occupational safety and health (OSH) purposes in private and public organisations. Current practices and regulations are unclear, and some stakeholders raised concerns about deploying this technology at work.
Methods:
Following the PRISMA-ScR checklist, we reviewed the main opportunities and ethical issues raised by using IoT devices for OSH purposes, as discussed in the academic literature. We searched peer-reviewed papers from 2008 to September 2023, written in English and available in "Web of Science," "PhilPapers," and "Google Scholar." We found 1,495 articles, of which 61 fulfilled the selection criteria. We classified ethical topics discussed in the papers in a coherent description frame.
Results:
We obtained 6 overarching categories: "ethical opportunities," "surveillance and problematic data re-purposing," "difficulty to inform, consult, and obtain consent from employees," "unintended and unpredictable adverse effects," "suboptimal data management," and "external factors that are conducive to ethical issues." The resulting list of problematic issues is unexpectedly furnished and substantial. Such a list provides information and guidance for those who wish to develop evaluation frameworks in line with a preventive regulatory approach. It also informs policymakers and practitioners about the governance of such tools for ensuring more OSH."

Frontiers is fully compliant with open access mandates, by publishing its articles under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY).

"From East to West, the economies of Europe and Central Asia (ECA) are not taking full advantage of the internet to foster economic growth and job creation. The residents of Central Asia and the South Caucasus pay some of the highest prices in the world for internet connections that are slow and unreliable. In contrast, Europe enjoys some of the world's fastest and affordable internet services. However, its firms and individuals are not fully exploiting the internet to achieve higher productivity growth as well as more and better jobs. Reaping Digital Dividends investigates the barriers that are holding back the broader adoption of the internet in ECA. The report identifies the main bottlenecks and provides policy recommendations tailored to economies at varying levels of digital development. It concludes that policies to increase internet access are necessary but not sufficient. Policies to foster competition, international trade and skills supply, as well as adapting regulations to the changing business environment and labor markets, will also be necessary. In other words, Reaping Digital Dividends not only requires better connectivity, but also complementary factors that allow governments, firms and individuals to make the most out of it."

"This paper exploits variations in the timing of telecommunications reforms across Europe to analyze the relationship between the rise of alternative work arrangements and the emergence of the Internet. The paper evaluates whether sectors that are technologically more dependent on information and communications technologies experienced disproportionately larger changes in their employment outcomes after telecommunications reforms were introduced. The main results point to a disproportionate increase in total employment, part-time work, and home-based work among information and communications technologies–intensive sectors after the implementation of telecommunications reforms. The analysis does not find a link between the incidence of temporary employment, self-employment, second job holding, and telecommunications reforms. The main results are robust to several specifications."

"This article examines the relationships between gender and technology in Spanish feminist praxis online and argues that different perspectives on online feminist community-building offer distinct responses to cyberactivism, which is considered central to sustaining efforts for social change. To ascertain whether Spanish virtual communities and cyberactivism have the potential to address the challenges posed by the relations between gender and technology, we analyse feminist scholar Remedios Zafra's theoretical proposals, and the different ways in which this theory intersects with the cyberactivism put forth by two feminist web portals, Ciudad de Mujeres and Mujeres en Red. We will discuss to what degree particular Spanish feminist theory and practice online adapts to or challenges utopianism regarding the liberating potential of technology. We will also examine how, in the face of critical arguments about such liberatory possibilities, two options present themselves for women's effective use of technology: inhabiting or occupying the web through the construction of feminist communities online."

"The author investigates how high-speed home Internet use has affected labor supply. Using an instrumental variables strategy that exploits cross-state variation in supply-side constraints to residential broadband Internet access, she finds that exogenously determined high-speed Internet use leads to a 4.1 percentage point increase in labor force participation for married women. No corresponding effect is found for single women or men. Among married women, the largest increases in participation are found among college-educated women with children. Supplemental analyses suggest that Internet use for telework and saving time in home production explains the increase in participation. The results suggest that home Internet facilitates work-family balance."