Smartphones and Exploitation in the Age of Digital Capitalism: Ordinary Aspects of the Transformation of Everyday Life

Abstract

This study examines the transformation of everyday life through smartphones, focusing on the daily experiences of smartphone users in Turkey. With their multimedia features, smartphones (defined as a “melting pot” from the technological perspective or polymedia and metamedia in a broader sense) take an important place in users’ everyday lives. As these features and the services accessible through smartphones are offered in commodity form, they inevitably result in the exploitation of users’ labour, the commodification of user data, the shifting of paid work into ‘leisure time’, and finally the transformation of everyday life through smartphones. The main argument of this study is that, under these social conditions, smartphones, referred to as “a melting pot” from the technological perspective, turn into a melting pot of exploitation, and their users experience these interactions not as direct economic relations but as routine social relations.