Aggregating and toggling: how people use platforms to do care, consumption, and convenience

Thesis

This thesis examines the case of two India-based food delivery platforms, Swiggy and Zomato and their users, to answer two main research questions about how people use digital platforms to do care, consumption, and convenience. The first question is about the aggregation of users and activities by digital platforms individually and collectively. The second question is about people’s experiences as platform users toggling between livelihood, consumption, and care as they buy and sell food.

Swiggy and Zomato’s aggregation through promotions is analysed here using digital ethnographic methods. The first two empirical chapters analyse how food delivery platforms emerge as cultural agents in India’s media and entertainment industries, not just as employers of gig workers. The first chapter focuses on how platforms use their app interfaces and push notifications. The second chapter scrutinises branding practices on platforms’ official social media handles on Instagram and Twitter.

The three remaining chapters analyse how platform users toggle i.e. switch between livelihood activities, care, and consumption and hold together demands from these through in-person, qualitative, and ethnographic methods in Mumbai, India. The third chapter examines how users contend with platforms via fleeting moments of encounter between consumers and businesses’ listings on Swiggy and Zomato’s interfaces. The fourth and fifth chapters explore practices and infrastructures of making meals and routines that are at the edges of platforms but have a bearing on how users analyse their own platform use.

This thesis analyses food delivery platforms as cultural agents and examines their understudied user-cultures across individual, household, business, and industry levels. It challenges dominant scholarly conceptions of platformized convenience by attending to users’ attachments and dissatisfactions with it. The implications of these analyses go much further beyond the specific platforms that I study, because I analyse wider processes of aggregation and toggling

Authors: Lalvani, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-exyepnnv9
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: platforms; Tiny Owl; food; Swiggy; users; gig economy; UberEats; India; Mumbai; Zomato; food delivery
• Subjects: Anthropology; Social media and culture; Food in popular culture; Culture; Gig economy; Internet