Faxon Hilary Oliva
Department of Society and Conservation, University of Montana, Missoula, MT USA.
Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Agric Human Values. 2023 May 6:1-15. doi: 10.1007/s10460-023-10446-2.
Despite increasing attention to the sensors, drones, robots, and apps permeating agri-food systems, little attention has been paid to social media, perhaps the most ubiquitous digital technology in rural areas globally. This article draws on analysis of farming groups on Myanmar Facebook to posit social media as : a generic technology incorporated into existing circuits of economic and social exchange that becomes a site of agrarian innovation. Through analysis of an original archive of popular posts collected from Myanmar-language Facebook pages and groups related to agriculture, I explore the ways that farmers, traders, agronomists and agricultural companies use social media to further agrarian commerce and knowledge. These activities evidence that farmers use Facebook not only to exchange market or planting information, but also to interact in ways structured by existing social, political and economic relations. More broadly, my analysis builds on insights from STS and postcolonial computing to disrupt assumptions about the totalizing power of digital technologies and affirm the relevance of social media to agriculture, while inviting new research into the surprising, ambiguous relationships between small farmers and big tech.
尽管人们越来越关注渗透到农业食品系统中的传感器、无人机、机器人和应用程序，但社交媒体——或许是全球农村地区最普遍存在的数字技术——却很少受到关注。本文通过对缅甸脸书上的农业群组进行分析，将社交媒体定位为：一种融入现有经济和社会交流循环的通用技术，它成为了农业创新的场所。通过分析从缅甸语脸书页面和与农业相关的群组中收集的热门帖子原始档案，我探讨了农民、贸易商、农学家和农业公司利用社交媒体促进农业商业和知识传播的方式。这些活动表明，农民使用脸书不仅是为了交流市场或种植信息，也是为了以由现有社会、政治和经济关系构建的方式进行互动。更广泛地说，我的分析基于科学技术与社会（STS）以及后殖民计算的见解，以打破对数字技术总体化力量的假设，并肯定社交媒体与农业的相关性，同时引发对小农户与大型科技公司之间令人惊讶且模糊的关系的新研究。
