Welcome to the Digital Village: Networking Geographies of Agrarian Change

• In Event: Networking Rurality Part 2

Abstract

Almost five billion people—two-thirds the global population—now go online. The internet has changed how we work, learn, govern, and fall in love. Yet new work in STS and critical data studies has only begun to grapple with the patterns and significance of internet connection for rural people and places, particularly in the Global South. In this paper, I bring together agrarian studies and digital geography to situate emergent online practices within longer trajectories of agrarian change in Myanmar, where the recent arrival of mobile internet is embedded in sweeping rural and political transformations. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, I show how farmers, migrants and grassroots activists of two ethnic groups incorporate Facebook into daily efforts to secure livelihoods, support communities, and mobilize in struggles over land. This analysis yields two key insights: first, agrarian questions increasingly play out in online spaces; second, digital geographies extend far beyond the city and are shaped by rural relations. To understand internet in the global countryside, I advance the notion of the digital village, a networked geography in which interlinked on- and offline practices both sustain and transform rural life.

Author

• Hilary Oliva Faxon, UC Berkeley