Welcome to the Digital Village: Networking Geographies of Agrarian Change

Faxon, Hilary Oliva

doi:10.1080/24694452.2022.2044752

Cited by 18 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…The platform was swiftly adopted by political actors and offices across the country, including in both the national government and non-state armed groups (Tønnesson et al, 2021). For Myanmar's largely rural population, where over half the labor force works in agriculture (Central Statistical Organization, 2020), social media extended existing economic, social, and political activities into the digital domain (Faxon, 2022).…”

Section: Internet Connectivity and Control In Myanmarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organic online politics: Farmers, Facebook, and Myanmar's military coup

et al. 2023

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Despite perennial hope in the democratic possibilities of the internet, the rise of digital authoritarianism threatens online and offline freedom across much of the world. Yet while critical data studies has expanded its geographic focus, limited work to date has examined digital mobilization in the agrarian communities that comprise much of the Global South. This article advances the concept of “organic online politics,” to demonstrate how digital mobilization grows from specific rural conditions, material concerns, and repertoires of resistance, within the constraints of authoritarian violence and internet control. To do so, we examine social media interaction in the wake of the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, an agrarian nation with recent, rapid digital connection that corresponded with a decade-long democratic turn. Analyzing an original archive of over 2000 Facebook posts collected from popular farming pages and groups, we find a massive drop-off in online activity after the military coup and analyze the shifting temporalities of digital mobilization. Crucially, we highlight the embeddedness of online interaction within the material concerns of farming communities, examining how social media become a key forum for negotiating political crisis in Myanmar's countryside. These findings call attention to rural digital subcultures as fertile sites of investigation and point toward the need for future scholarship on data practices that attends to rooted agrarian struggles.

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Section: Internet Connectivity and Control In Myanmarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organic online politics: Farmers, Facebook, and Myanmar's military coup

et al. 2023

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“…For brokers like Ma Ma Gyi and the farmers she worked with, personal relations and embodied knowledge of food and agriculture remained the primary tools for survival, even as the military consolidated its hold on telecommunications infrastructure and bided its time. While many rural residents embraced Facebook to learn about market prices or buy seeds, an even more important function was to stay connected to a translocal village community of labour migrants and the platform was central to efforts to mobilise for land justice (Faxon, 2022). Such reappropriations of a major tech platform into agrarian life reframe critiques of techno‐capitalism and call for a revitalised engagement with the lived.…”

Section: Inhabiting the Spaces Of Smart Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical geographies of smart development

Faxon

Kintzi

2022

Trans Inst British Geog

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The development of smart infrastructures is a political act that intersects, in powerful ways, with ongoing decolonial struggles across the uneven landscapes of the postcolonial world. This paper develops a grounded, relational approach to the critical geographies of smart development that starts from place‐based relations of power to investigate how specific postcolonial dynamics inflect the global articulation of smart development. Drawing on the work of Gillian Hart, our approach situates the development of smart infrastructures within longer, contested histories of geopolitical intervention and capitalist transformation and foregrounds ongoing land, labour and livelihood struggles that transect the urban–rural divide. Using critical ethnography and relational comparison in South East Asia and the Middle East, we show how Myanmar's smart farms and Jordan's smart grid were built and selectively adapted or refused in ways that furthered existing inequalities and ontologies of disconnection, while providing material conduits for the enhancement of ethno‐nationalist projects to define the postcolonial state. This approach reframes the stakes of smart development, providing pathways for generative comparison that centres ongoing equity struggles and historically situated constellations of power to understand how smart development materialises in the postcolonial world.

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“…Buying and selling land in Myanmar used to be a slow, intimate and illicit affair. In Faxon's oral histories, farmers recounted buying small plots of land from their neighbours, or from earlier settlers who had cleared forest to cultivate rice (Faxon 2020). The price of land varied according to its quality.…”

Section: Making Myanmar's Digital Land Marketmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The price of an internet‐enabled SIM card dropped from nearly $2,500 in 2012 to under $2 in 2016, triggering a dramatic increase in mobile broadband usage, from 0.6% in 2012 to 55% in 2017 (World Bank 2018). While this self‐styled democratic transition came to a dramatic halt following a February 2021 military coup, the consequences of expanding connectivity were dramatic, with Facebook quickly becoming a major venue for political news, grassroots mobilisation, cultural expression and business transactions (Faxon 2022; McCarthy 2018; Prasse‐Freeman and Kabya 2021; The‐Thitsar 2022). Buying and selling land, too, found new formulations online.…”

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confidence: 99%

Networks of Speculation: Making Land Markets on Myanmar Facebook

Wittekind

Faxon

2022

Antipode

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Digital platforms have changed how property is sold and valued in the Global North, yet little is known about digital tools in emerging land markets. Drawing on in situ and digital ethnography, we argue that Facebook plays a key role in making a new kind of market in Myanmar, one in which land is transformed into a speculative asset, exchanged across ever‐expanding networks. While commodification is familiar within longer histories of capitalism, this case highlights the significance of digital platforms to the contemporary remaking of property relations. Unlike classic cases of market‐making enabled by active state regulation, Myanmar’s digital land markets were forged in the context of state absence by brokers who harnessed the technological affordances of social media to increase the scale, scope and speed of transactions. This creative re‐appropriation of the platform forged new, unregulated digital markets that ultimately accumulated corporate profits and intensified participant risk.

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Welcome to the Digital Village: Networking Geographies of Agrarian Change

Cited by 18 publications

References 70 publications

Organic online politics: Farmers, Facebook, and Myanmar's military coup

Organic online politics: Farmers, Facebook, and Myanmar's military coup

Critical geographies of smart development

Networks of Speculation: Making Land Markets on Myanmar Facebook

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