Abstract:

Throughout history, social transformations have been closely related to the means of production and what will be made an object of labor and in what way. In the feudal society, the object of labor is mostly land, and the coordination of the division of labor is relatively weaker than in the industrial society. When it comes to industrial society, the object of labor has become industrial products that can be scaled with the help of more advanced production tools, and the coordination in the division of labor has intensified. Thus, production within the limits of the scaling possibility of the means of production has gradually become social production. However, change continues. Today, digitalization is actually about the new division of labor that emerged as a result of the transformation in the means of production, a new degree of coordination of this division of labor, and what will be made an object of labor. In the digitalization process, the world has become more coordinated by being connected to each other with supply and communication chains at a higher level than ever before in human history, and scaling opportunities have increased with the development of production tools. Thus, the boundaries of commoditizable things expanded, and as the boundaries of capital and communication expanded, the world turned into a factory. Especially as the limits of commoditizable things increase, communication itself becomes a commodity, thus human beings become alienated from their most basic essence. Under these conditions, the concept of digital labor, which was put forward to make sense of the transformation in labor formation, brings with it ethical, political economy and political problems. Among these problems, the problem of damaging privacy and surveillance of data in the name of digital labor in the ethical dimension stands out; exploitation of labor in the context of political economy; In the political sense, the echo chambers created by algorithms attract attention. However, field studies on the awareness of labor producers regarding these problems are limited. For this reason, the study focuses on the increasingly important phenomenon of digital labor and the problematic of how its effects are perceived by Instagram users. The aim of the research is to determine the awareness level of Instagram users that they are subjected to exploitation and surveillance while providing digital labor input to the platform. In the study, qualitative research method was preferred and maximum sampling variation was used, and an in-depth interview was conducted with the study group consisting of 12 Instagram users within the scope of the phenomenology pattern. The research found that users were not aware that they were subjected to exploitation and surveillance in the context of digital labor production through the use of the platform.

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