Riley & Robertson: The Virtual Good Farmer
In The Virtual Good Farmer: Farmers’ Use of Social Media and the (Re)Presentation of “Good Farming,” Mark Riley (Geography & Planning, University of Liverpool) and Bethany Robertson (Sociology & Social Policy, University of Leeds) offering the first consideration of how social media may be impacting the presentation, reinforcement, and reworking of notions of good farming and “the good farmer.”
The authors recognize the multiple opportunities social media offers to identify “good” farmer and farming as responsible and ethical farming practices. They examined 5,000 tweets from 16 women, 29 men, and 5 farm-level accounts and interviewed 22 farmers who use Twitter. There were five main types of Twitter interactions: (1) frontstage, (2) backstage, (3) temporalities, (4) realities, and (5) displaying and debating. Frontstage takes the front-facing views of farming (i.e., fields or products) and displays them on Twitter. Backstage takes the “behind-the-scenes” pictures of what goes on beyond the public eye, such as livestock living conditions. Temporalities are similar to backstage but focus more on what the farmer does in a “day-in-the-life.” For instance, the article shows a tweet of farmers bringing in a crop during the Fourth of July, showing the realities of the day. This is different from the fourth Twitter interaction, realities. Realities show more negative sides of farming that are sometimes forgotten, such as heavy rains ruining a crop. The fifth interaction, displaying and debating, is the most familiar to the standard Twitter user. It acts as a sounding board for farmers, widening the social circle and allowing more opinions on a particular method or theory.
This article shows an actual merger of technology and rurality, suggesting ways in which new technology-based interactions may enhance rural community building and mentorship opportunities that have otherwise traditionally been more difficult in rural spaces. The authors explore social media as a possible tool for overcoming some of the isolation that can otherwise exist in rural spaces and highlight the opportunity to reveal some of the otherwise unseen, or perhaps not well publicized, agricultural labor sector. The authors also identify future work to be done on the use of social media in farming with an aim of developing more nuanced understandings of farmers’ perspectives and how different standard social media practices will affect farmers.
