On Agricultural Techniques: Broadcast, precision, and the media of culture

Abstract

Following the advent of precision agriculture in the context of an emerging informatic ideal in farming, digital media technologies of virtually every kind are now increasingly employed in agrarian contexts, making entanglements of media and agriculture explicit and critical scholarship needed. Such developments have significant political, ethical, and ecological consequences media scholars are uniquely positioned to engage across multiple axes. Yet dedicated work in media studies on agriculture is limited. Accordingly, this article advances an argument for a media studies of agriculture that attends to both contemporary and historical insinuations of these two culture industries, employing (1) the agriculturally rooted media concept of cultural techniques and (2) brief histories of the media-agricultural concept of broadcasting and its relation to imperatives for precision “targeting” as a means for framing and exploring such connections toward future work in this area.