Benjamin Shestakofsky’s co-authored article “Making Platforms Work: Relationship Labor and the Management of Publics” has been selected as the recipient of the 2021 Star-Nelkin Paper Award, awarded by the ASA’s Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology.
From the paper's abstract:
"How do digital platforms govern their users? Existing studies, with their focus on impersonal and procedural modes of governance, have largely neglected to examine the human labor through which platform companies attempt to elicit the consent of their users. This study describes the relationship labor that is systematically excised from many platforms’ accounts of what they do and missing from much of the scholarship on platform governance."