Appropriated or Inauthentic Care in Gig-Economy Platforms: A Psycho- linguistic Analysis of Uber and Lyft

In this late breaking work, we present preliminary results from a portion of an auto-ethnography in which an HCI scholar drove for both Uber and Lyft over the course of 4 months, recording his thoughts about the driving experience as well as his experiences with-and emails from-both platforms. The first phase of results we present here are based on several text analyses of the collected emails, as well as a preliminary examination of field notes in relation to these emails. We found that while Uber and Lyft participate in the gig economy in almost identical ways, the difference in tone apparent through each platform's messaging could lead to conflicting experiences for drivers. We identify implications for the potential future analyses of our autoethnographic data in relation to this psycholinguistic analysis.