Welcome to the Digital Village: Networking Geographies of Agrarian Change

Abstract

Almost 5 billion people—two thirds of the global population—now go online. The Internet has changed how we work, learn, govern, and fall in love. Yet despite its digital turn, geography has failed to grapple with the patterns and significance of Internet connection for rural people and places, particularly in the Global South. This article brings together agrarian studies and digital geography to situate emergent online practices within longer trajectories of agrarian change. To do so, I advance the concept of the digital village, a networked social space in which online practices emerge from existing agrarian relations to reconfigure the strategies of economic survival, the landscapes of home, and the tactics of politics. Drawing on ethnographic research in Myanmar, I show how agrarian relations shape patterns of digital connection and how farmers, migrants, and grassroots activists incorporate Facebook into daily efforts to secure livelihoods, support communities, and mobilize in struggles over land. This analysis yields two key insights: first, digital geographies are embedded in rural relations; second, agrarian questions increasingly play out online.

目前有近50亿网民, 占全球人口的三分之二。互联网改变了我们的工作、学习、管理和恋爱方式。尽管地理学已经实现数字化, 但地理学未能理解互联网连接在（尤其是发展中国家的）农村居民和地方的模式和意义。结合农业研究和数字地理学, 本文考虑了农业变化长期轨迹中的新兴在线行为。为此, 我推动了数字村庄的概念：网络化的社会空间。现有农业关系中涌现的在线行为, 重新配置了经济生存战略、家庭景观和政治策略。通过缅甸的人种学研究, 我展示了农业关系如何塑造数字连接模式, 以及农民、移民和民间活动人士如何将Facebook融入日常工作中, 以确保生计、支持社区、在土地斗争中动员起来。分析得出两个重要观点：数字地理存在于农村关系中, 农业问题越来越多地出现在网上。

Alrededor de 5.000 millones de personas –dos tercios de la población global– están ahora conectadas a Internet. Internet ha cambiado la forma como trabajamos, aprendemos, gobernamos y nos enamoramos. Con todo, pese a su giro digital, la geografía no ha sido capaz de lidiar con los patrones y la significancia de la conexión a la Internet para las gentes y lugares rurales, particularmente en el Sur Global. Este artículo reúne los estudios agrarios y la geografía digital para situar las prácticas emergentes dentro de las más largas trayectorias del cambio agrario. Para hacer esto, propongo el concepto de la aldea digital, un espacio social en red en el que las prácticas en línea emergen de las relaciones agrarias existentes, para reconfigurar las estrategias de la supervivencia económica, los paisajes hogareños y las tácticas de la política. Basándome en investigación etnográfica realizada en Myanmar, muestro cómo las relaciones agrarias configuran los patrones de la conexión digital, y cómo los agricultores, migrantes y activistas de base incorporan Facebook en sus esfuerzos cotidianos para asegurar la supervivencia, apoyar a las comunidades y movilizarse en sus luchas por la tierra. El análisis genera dos conclusiones clave: en primer lugar, las geografías digitales están integradas a las relaciones rurales; y en segundo lugar, las cuestiones agrarias se plantean cada vez más en línea.

Key Words:

• agrarian studies
• critical data studies
• digital geography
• Myanmar
• social media

关键词:

• 农业研究
• 批判数据研究
• 数字地理
• 缅甸
• 社交媒体。

Palabras clave:

• estudios agrarios
• estudios críticos de datos
• geografía digital
• medios sociales
• Myanmar

“I have committed my Facebook to God.”

Below swaying palm trees in the hot, dusty breeze of Myanmar’s dry season, Benjamin explained to me how he employed his considerable digital talents to spread the Lord’s word. Over the chug-chug of occasional motorcycles passing along the dirt road, Benjamin described his online chats with other young people—lonely migrants and desperate victims of human trafficking—a practice that amounted to spiritual counseling via Facebook Messenger. In using the platform to extend Christianity and his own spiritual authority, Benjamin was updating a traditional path for charismatic men of his Chin ethnic group, an overwhelming number of whom become ministers, missionaries, or evangelists despite religious persecution in the Buddhist nation. Benjamin did not have a physical church, but he used Facebook to serve his God and his people; for example, by soliciting donations on the village Facebook group for a new community center. Our chat provided a welcome respite from Benjamin’s volunteer work pouring concrete, likely purchased with money sent from abroad, for the building. Later that day over fresh-pressed sugarcane juice at the local market, Benjamin told me how he had taught his mother Facebook to communicate with her other children, all of whom had migrated abroad. She, too, was a frequent user.

Like many settlements in this part of northwestern Myanmar, Benjamin’s village had been founded just two generations earlier when Chin farmers abandoned their swidden plots and came down from the nearby hills to pursue a better life via sedentary agriculture. The region’s historic and continuing reliance on farming is typical of Myanmar, where 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas (Department of Population 2015) and over half of the labor force is employed in agriculture (Central Statistical Organization 2020). I had come to interview Chin Christian rice farmers and their Burman Buddhist neighbors to understand how different ethnic groups experienced agrarian change and struggles for land during Myanmar’s self-styled transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 2010s. Yet I increasingly found myself in conversation with their children: youth who saw no future in farming but aspired to get married and settle down in the village. They had little to say about land reform but were enthusiastic about the arrival of the Internet.

After the 2014 breakup of the military junta’s telecommunications monopoly, Myanmar became the fastest growing smartphone society in the world. Digital connection increased astronomically: The population online jumped from 1 percent in 2011 to at least 40 percent in 2017 (Brooten, McElhone, and Venkiteswaran 2019). Although the Internet replaced landline pay phones and censored news as the primary sources of information and communication, access was not inherently emancipatory. On the contrary, as Facebook swiftly positioned itself as Myanmar’s dominant platform, the world’s most popular social media site provided dangerous tools to expand repressive government surveillance and spread anti-Muslim violence (Dean 2017; Fink 2018), most notably in the case of the Rohingya genocide (Stecklow 2018). Yet scholars have highlighted the ways in which subaltern groups use Facebook for economic advancement or cultural preservation (Frydenlund and Lei 2021; The-Thitsar 2021) and argued that digital connection must be understood within longer histories of governance and communication (Schissler 2015; McCarthy 2018; Goldstein and Faxon 2022). Such studies underscore the paradoxes of digital connection in a country that has become an archetypal case of the global problems and power of big tech.

For Benjamin, and for many of his neighbors at home and peers abroad, digital media was increasingly important to, even constitutive of, village life. This insight challenges mainstream modernization theories that predict, on one hand, rapid rural exit and, on the other, a digital divide resulting in widespread technological illiteracy in nonurban, non-Western places. Benjamin’s creative use of social media to support his community represented a subset of the online practices I saw in rural Myanmar, where farmers used Facebook to buy seeds and seek agricultural advice and grassroots activists leveraged the platform in public campaigns and private lobbying for land justice. Although development actors have touted digital connection as a tool for poverty remediation, these online practices and their material consequences could not be tidily reduced to an economic benefit stemming from increased information. Facebook was implicated in the spread of hate, controlled by a foreign corporation and policed by a still-authoritarian state. Yet within these constraints, creative online practices emerged from existing social relations on the former agricultural frontier. In turn, quotidian practices of Facebook messaging, posting, and commenting—activities Leszczynski (2019) dubbed the “digital mundane”—became increasingly important to rural life.

In an agrarian nation like Myanmar, lived experiences of rapid technological change are intertwined with the broader currents of rural transformation. Yet despite increasing scholarly and popular interest in the digital, accounts of how rural people actually engage platforms are few, particularly in the Global South. Digital geography has illuminated the ways in which virtual worlds are entangled with existing inequalities, yet a fixation on smart cities limits the explanatory power of this body of theory. Agrarian studies provide a rich set of analytical tools for thinking about how material practices and social histories shape technological change in the countryside yet have so far failed to grapple with the arrival of the Internet. Alone, neither literature is adequate to explain the ways in which Benjamin’s social media use extended village life into virtual space and corralled online communities into material investments, like the community center, that remade rural places.

This article situates digital geography in actual agrarian landscapes by describing and theorizing the interlinked on- and offline practices that both sustain and transform rural life. I use the term digital village to name a networked social space in which online practices emerge from existing agrarian relations to reconfigure the strategies of economic survival, the landscapes of home, and the tactics of politics. The digital village is, first, a site of investigation and, second, a conceptual strategy. As an empirical phenomenon, the digital village describes how agrarian processes increasingly take place online and online practices are shaped by longer trajectories of agrarian change. The term does not mean that everyone in rural Myanmar used the Internet but rather that the Internet—specifically Facebook accessed by mobile phones—was becoming inseparable from the daily practices that constituted rural life. Such findings suggest that we cannot understand either contemporary agrarian transformation or digital connection without examining how online platforms are entangled with rural livelihoods, communities, and politics.

As a conceptual strategy, the digital village centers the agrarian relations that shape the adoption, use, and perceived value of the Internet. From digital geography, this approach incorporates insights into the cultural specificity, political economy, and technological affordances of the digital. From agrarian studies, it takes an emphasis on materiality, social relations, and mobility within and beyond the village. In return, the digital village offers an approach that grounds critical data studies while grappling with a new agrarian question, one that considers how online practices materialize in rural landscapes. In contrast to reductive notions such as the digital divide, the digital village theorizes networked geographies where both the specificity of soil and seasons and the particularities of social media platforms structure work, collective action, and relations to the state.

In the section that follows, I bring the growing field of digital geography together with insights from agrarian studies to theorize the digital village. I next outline my methodological approach before discussing how existing agrarian relations, along with the political economy of Myanmar’s telecommunications, shaped Internet adoption. I detail the ways in which agrarian questions are increasingly playing out in online spaces by examining how villagers use Facebook to secure livelihoods, support community, and mobilize for land justice. My analysis shows how villagers’ creative use of online platforms often construed as Western and urban builds on existing social infrastructures to reproduce certain aspects of rural life, albeit in new forms.

From Digital Divide to Digital Village

The growing field of digital geography explores how digital tools represent and remake sociospatial relations. Scholars highlight the increasing entanglement of digital connection with research across the discipline, calling geographers to investigate the ways in which digital technologies challenge and transform place-based identities and social relations (Ash, Kitchin, and Leszczynski 2018). This diverse body of research includes feminist studies of digital labor (Richardson 2018), political economy analyses of the geoweb (Leszczynski 2012), insights into the geopolitics of computing clouds (Amoore 2018), and a political ecology of Bitcoin (Lally, Kay, and Thatcher 2022). Although digital geographers take seriously the particular technological affordances of social media sites (boyd 2015), they insist that the Internet is not a disembodied entity but rather a spatial phenomenon, unfolding in relation to existing geographies (Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Graham, Zook, and Boulton 2013).

To build theory, then, it is necessary to examine digital connection in a wide variety of field sites. Yet most research takes as its object the new technologies of urban governance and life in so-called smart cities of the Global North (Graham, Zook, and Boulton 2013; Wilmott 2016; Rose 2017; Ash 2019). Illustrative of this trend is a recent special issue on “Smart Spaces and Places” in this journal, which included twenty-one articles, twenty of which examined urban environments from a variety of epistemological and methodological perspectives (Bian 2020). The exception highlighted barriers to technological access and use in the rural United States, or what the authors called “the smart divide” (Li, Chen, and Wu 2020). This framing builds on the idea of the digital divide, one popular not only in interdisciplinary scholarship but also in development practice, by emphasizing the inability to meaningfully use technology in addition to problems of access (Lee 2016). Adopting this lens of lacking allowed Li, Chen, and Wu (2020) to document infrastructure gaps and advance policy solutions, but it obfuscates how technologies are actively transforming rural North American landscapes; for example, through the apps, sensors, drones, robot milkers, and smart tractors discussed in scholarship on digital agriculture (Bronson and Knezevic 2016; Carolan 2019; Fraser 2019; Rotz et al. 2019). Beyond these empirical blind spots is a more troubling analytical and political problem: The digital divide highlights inequalities without interrogating the embedded social processes that reproduce them and, in doing so, echoes long-standing stereotypes of a backward countryside.

In contrast to these notions of deficit, feminist digital geographers Elwood and Leszczynski (2018) called for a relational understanding of on- and offline inequalities by “unpacking how people make sense and meaning of data and technologies in the spaces and practices of their everyday lives, how they grapple with the effects and consequences of a digital society, and how these effects and consequences manifest differently across spaces and subject/ivities” (640). Serious interrogation of the ways in which oppression and resistance are reiterated and transformed through the digital requires locating oneself and one’s case; feminist and postcolonial scholars have repeatedly demonstrated that where we theorize from matters for the worlds, we describe and create (hooks 1984; Massey 1993). A narrow focus on urban infrastructures runs the risk of both overselling and undertheorizing the power of digital technologies, as well as their novelty. Situating digital geography therefore requires moving beyond the smart city to examine Internet infrastructures and politics in a broad range of places, including the world’s agrarian communities.

Digital technologies are actively transforming the countryside but not always in the ways those in the metropole might expect. In and beyond rural Myanmar, people increasingly use digital platforms to conduct the types of activities that have long interested scholars of agrarian change: to support livelihoods on- and off-farm, to socialize and develop the village community, and to mobilize politically. Understanding these phenomena is central to theorizing agrarian change in a mobile, digital age. Agrarian studies scholars increasingly incorporate social media review into their methodologies, as evidenced by the examination of Facebook posts and activities within recent articles exploring topics ranging from peasant agroecology movements in India to rural state making in Mongolia to the marketing strategies of first-generation Latino smallholders in the United States (cf. Khadse et al. 2018; Minkoff-Zern 2018; Ahearn 2020; Siebert 2020; van der Ploeg 2020; Baird 2021). Engagement with social media sources is often presented as ad hoc, however: Informants reference online activities or rumors, and social movements and state authorities rely on digital communications in addition to analog strategies. In contrast, a small but growing number of studies explicitly investigate topics at the intersections of agriculture and digitization—for example, open source seeds (Kloppenburg 2010; Montenegro de Wit 2019)—and another emerging body of work considers the social implications of rural Internet, predominantly in the Global North (Gray 2009; Wallace et al. 2017; Tiwari, Lane, and Alam 2019). Yet although this research increasingly acknowledges or even interrogates digitization, it stops short of providing a critical and integrative framework for understanding the agrarian Internet.

Although agrarian studies has largely ignored the conceptual implications of digital connection, it offers three sets of insights to inform digital geography and the larger interdisciplinary field of critical data studies. First, agrarian studies helps to resist totalizing, top-down narratives of technological determinism by providing more than a century of rich debate on the limits of capitalism in the countryside (Bernstein 2001; Borras 2009; Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010). Kautsky’s ([1899] 1988) original agrarian question underscored how peasant production was both resistant to and radically transformed by the arrival of capitalism, including when industrial technologies of farm production met the realities of rocky soil and family labor. Similar attention to ecological conditions, kin, and class relations can strengthen understanding of production and politics under techno-capitalism today, complicating and correcting generalized analyses such as Zuboff’s (2019) surveillance capitalism. Second, contemporary critical agrarian studies centers rural lived experiences, political economies, and social relations, asserting that agrarian societies are not marginal to but rather constitutive of global modernity (Edelman and Wolford 2017). Feminist accounts complement the field’s traditional attention to class differentiation with robust analysis of the ways in which gender, generation, race, and religion shape access to resources and identities (Hart 1991; Carney 2008; Chung 2017). This work resonates with emerging feminist digital geography and the longer tradition of feminist science studies. By characterizing agrarian space as a rich and contested terrain, rather than a site of deficiency, this scholarship provides a strong foundation for asking about the implications of digitization for existing social relations. Finally, agrarian studies has long been grappling with the interconnections between city and country and, over the past two decades, increasingly explored how migration reshapes the rural (Hart and Sitas 2004; McKay 2005; Scoones 2009; Kelly 2011; Rigg 2019; Kelley et al. 2020). Seen in this context, digital connections are not alien impositions but rather emergent elements within larger patterns of rural mobility (Milbourne and Kitchen 2014). In my case, social media provides ways to stay connected to the village while seeking work elsewhere; (former) farmers use digital tools to reproduce and reimagine rural communities in an unevenly connected world.

Together, these ideas point beyond the deficit implied in the concept of digital divide toward a more robust theorization of how interlinked on- and offline practices both sustain and transform rural life. As a networked social space, the digital village both reflects the imbrication of digital practices within rural life and theorizes the mutual constitution of digital and agrarian transformations. Bringing together the analytical force of digital geography and agrarian studies, the digital village situates online practices in particular rural communities while networking the geographies of agrarian change.

Building a Networked Field Site

Digital ubiquity raises new moral and methodological questions for geography (Duggan 2017; Holton and Harmer 2019). Many of these concerns are shared by interdisciplinary Internet ethnographers such as Burrell (2009), who argued for thinking about the field site as a network of physical and virtual spaces, iteratively constructed by the researcher. In doing so, she builds on the now-classic notion that global flows demand multisited anthropological strategies (Marcus 1995; Ferguson and Gupta 2002), one that is also gathering force in critical agrarian studies (cf. Paprocki 2018). These traditions inform my own multisited digital ethnography, one grounded in rural landscapes and iteratively extended into virtual domains.

I did not set out to study the digital village. Rather, I was confronted with the entanglement of on- and offline worlds over the course of a research project on land politics and agrarian change during Myanmar’s postauthoritarian transformation. This study built on my previous work in Myanmar since 2013 and included ethnographic participation and 150 interviews with farmers, officials, and activists conducted between January 2017 and December 2019. I centered my research in the Kalay Valley, a former frontier of smallholder agricultural expansion where religious and ethnic minority Chin people and members of Myanmar’s dominant ethnic group, the Burman Buddhists, farm rice, peanuts, and sunflowers in adjacent villages. After Facebook started recurring not only in conversations with Yangon or grassroots activists but also with villagers, I realized that understanding the arrival of smartphones was essential to answering my original research questions about the shifting use, values, and governance of land.

My longer engagement with and physical residence in Kalay’s villages was essential to how I studied and interpreted online practices. To explore local histories and experiences of technological change, I conducted focus group discussions about technology adoption and use in seven villages, five Burman and two Chin, where I had previously worked. To recruit participants, I asked a local interlocuter in each village to invite eight to twelve men and women, including participants of varied ages, education levels, and wealth. After introducing each other and asking demographic information of each participant, we worked together with colored notecards and a long sheet of paper to create a visual technology timeline to understand when various machines, including smartphones, tractors, and combine harvesters, had arrived and become common in the village. We then discussed the uses, advantages, and disadvantages of different technologies, focusing the final part of our discussion on phones, Facebook, and the Internet. Focus groups gave a broad sense of village technology histories, highlighting the rapid changes of the democratic decade and the range of experiences across villages and among different demographics.

To better understand individual experiences of digital activities, I followed these focus groups with what I call Facebook-elicitation interviews, which I conducted in the Myanmar language with sixteen active village-resident Facebook users. I often asked questions as we scrolled together through the participant’s phone. Using Facebook together was essential for me to understand how villagers interpreted the meaning of posts. In these conversations we discussed the images on the screen and their larger social context, employing strategies similar to those used in work on photo-elicitation and participatory photography (Wang and Burris 1997; Sentíes Portilla 2017; Chung, Young, and Kerr 2018; Faxon 2020; Spiegel 2020). To track and analyze the types of content being posted and shared online, I reviewed five village Facebook groups, as well as news, government, agriculture, diaspora, and activist Facebook profiles, pages, and public and messenger groups, which were mentioned in these and other interviews with activists, farmers, former migrants, officials, and village heads. During my broader study, I participated in events such as the Myanmar Digital Rights Forum in January 2019 and had dozens of informal conversations about Internet use that helped to generate new questions, guide my interpretations, and contextualize my findings. Resolutely grounded in the specificity of ethnic communities in my long-term field site, my ethnographic data tell stories about a particular set of digital villages that invite new inquiries into the ways in which social media extends and reshapes the rural.

Internet Infrastructures on Agrarian Landscapes

I had only been living in Myanmar for a few months on the late monsoon day when the SIM cards came. I paid $120 for my first phone connection in June 2014; a few years before, a military government telecommunications monopoly meant that mobile SIMs cost over $1,000, an amount roughly equivalent to Myanmar’s average annual income. By the time I arrived, everyone had heard that cheap connections were coming. As part of a broader push for economic liberalization, the military-reform government awarded the first private telecommunication licenses to the Qatari firm Ooredoo and the Norwegian Telenor in January 2014. The following August, I woke to find the crooked, crowded streets of my Yangon neighborhood festooned with Ooredoo maroon; the Qataris had beat the Norwegians to provide coverage in major cities. Vendors were selling SIM cards alongside pagoda flower bouquets and steamed buns, all for $1 each.

Telecom privatization was part of the reforms undertaken as part of Myanmar’s self-styled transition from dictatorship to democracy. Although the 2021 military coup dealt a stunning blow to dreams of freedom from military rule, the preceding decade of liberalization resulted in a dramatic increase in Internet connection and mobile phone use across Myanmar, including in the villages where I worked. Residents explained that before 2010, there were almost no phones in the village; to place a call, they would walk or bike to town and pay a rental business to use a landline phone. In focus groups, respondents reported that cell phones first appeared in the village between 2010 and 2014, when the richest or luckiest residents could afford to buy a SIM card or won them in “lucky draw” phone lotteries. Phones became more popular after prices started to decline. In early 2019, all focus groups reported that every household in their village had a phone. Most village youth I met had bought a personal smartphone within the last three years and used Facebook every day. Although Viber remained a popular alternative to Facebook Messenger and former migrants had sometimes experimented with the Thai app Line and the Chinese WeChat, Facebook was clearly king. These observations reflect national trends: A 2019 public opinion survey found that a third of respondents used Facebook every day and that Facebook was the most popular mode for getting news and information for those under age thirty-five (International Republican Institute 2019).

Facebook’s dominance of Myanmar’s Internet was no accident. The company was aggressive about capturing new users as Myanmar came online, offering free data and then heavy discounts as part of “Free Basics,” a global initiative touted as humanitarian that has been harshly criticized as neocolonial (Kwet 2019; Nothias 2020). By the time the program was discontinued in September 2017, the platform, predominantly accessed by mobile phones, had become intrinsic to Myanmar entertainment, information, business, and social connection (Whitten-Woodring et al. 2020). In the latter half of the military-reform government (2011–2016), the Minister of Information’s Facebook page became a key medium of official communication, often the first to announce major updates. Under the civilian National League for Democracy (NLD; 2016–2021), each government office had a Facebook page. De facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal page, started after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to communicate public health information, amassed more than 2 million followers in its first month.

These national dynamics, along with existing agrarian relations, shaped local uses of the Internet. Around Kalay, villagers used Facebook to read news from print media outlets and government pages, watch sports, and catch up on local happenings. Individuals posted photos of family and friends alongside text that ranged from Buddhist or Christian teachings to political opinions to original fiction. They chatted with family abroad, next-door neighbors, or people they had never met. Unlike Facebook in the United States, users did not necessarily see Facebook profiles as reflections of their offline selves. They chose new names and photos, frequently using the site to chat with strangers (focus group participants teased each other about joining the social network to meet girlfriends). Online activities typically followed gendered patterns, a theme I explore further in what follows in relation to agrarian livelihoods. Agrarian class relations also shaped unequal Internet access: Whereas high costs and poor coverage limited the time rural people spent online in comparison to urbanites, poor households, in particular, struggled to afford phones and credit.

Although everyone I spoke with believed that Facebook’s importance would only increase, not everyone used the Internet personally. Older farmers often used feature phones rather than smartphones and, in focus groups, notably quieted when it came time to talk about the Internet or told me bluntly to ask the youth. In a focus group with elder Chin men, one farmer explained that although he thought that phones were useful—they could be used to call city fertilizer shops, fish brokers, and customers or to coordinate water usage among irrigation groups—expensive, Internet-enabled devices were not practical for people his age. He said, “For a real farmer it is not good to use a smartphone. The old generation drops it in the water again and again.” Some elders had been taught to use Facebook by their children. In the same focus group, another man showed a video his son had found for him showing a machine that reaped rice. The elders crowded around his phone and deemed the video entertaining but unrealistic; such a machine was too expensive for small farmers. Rather than using the Internet themselves, many older farmers relied on their children for Facebook updates. This extension of online activities into offline spaces through intergenerational ties exemplifies the networked quality of the digital village.

Ethnicity also shaped agrarian adoption of the Internet. Chin people were particularly active in adapting Facebook to support and extend analogue ethnic institutions such as churches, newspapers, development associations, and language and culture groups that had long organized community life. Chin villages I visited often had a village Facebook group along with other groups that, as I detail later, provided space to celebrate cultural identity and collect material support. In contrast, in over a dozen Burman villages around the Kalay, I found only one, relatively inactive, village Facebook group. These differences stem from distinct ethnic histories of state persecution, international migration, and social organization. Although Burman villagers I met had sometimes migrated within the country, experience working abroad was less common, though increasingly popular. In contrast, due to both violence at home and opportunities for work and refugee status abroad, Chin people have extensive diasporas in India, Thailand, Malaysia, the United States, and Europe. These high levels of migration not only shaped livelihood strategies (Vicol, Pritchard, and Htay 2018) but also necessitated (and often funded) communication technologies.

Chin communities’ longer history of, and perceived need for, digital connection was evident when I asked Chin villagers what came before Facebook and heard about the “Gmail kit,” or the era of Gmail. Gmail enabled communication between far-flung families, news of village events, and information about remittance flows, which typically came via Western Union, long before the arrival of Facebook. The era of Gmail was over, though, Chin villagers explained: Facebook had quickly supplanted the letter-like e-mail with an interactive medium that could serve as news source, soapbox, and meeting space, in addition to facilitating private communication. In contrast, when I asked Burmans what came before Facebook, I heard stories about landline payphones or, more often, riding bicycles to neighboring villages. These two histories—the era of Gmail and the era of the bicycle—reflect the ways in which ethnicity shapes how Facebook was perceived and used.

Existing agrarian relations played an important role in materializing digital geographies. Although villagers might assume a new online nickname or chat with strangers, their gender, class, generational, and ethnic identities mediated Internet access and use. Reinforcing offline identities in online spaces can paradoxically deepen both connection and exclusion, as The-Thitsar (2021) described in her analysis of how Facebook use both contributes to Burmanization and preserves ethnic minority languages and cultures in Myanmar. Both banal technological practices and acute online threats stem from long and local social histories. Rural relations and priorities also shape how villagers incorporated online practices into agrarian life. I turn now to how villagers used Facebook to secure livelihoods, support community, and mobilize politically.

Agrarian Relations in Online Spaces

Securing Livelihoods

One young Burman woman I call Ma Hlaing illustrates some of the ways in which villagers used social media to advance farm and off-farm livelihoods. I first met Ma Hlaing in early 2019, when she attended a technology focus group discussion in her village. As we sat on the monastery floor listening to the men explain tractors and combine harvesters, I noticed several older women looking over the shoulder of a woman in her early thirties, who was scrolling on her smartphone. When we asked about phones, the older men fell silent and Ma Hlaing volunteered that she had two Facebook accounts, one for pyinnyaye (learning) and one for personal use.

Confused and intrigued, I returned later to interview Ma Hlaing. Her parents’ house was adjacent to the one-acre plot where the family grew pagoda flowers for sale. Ma Hlaing took a break from sewing an angyi, a traditional woman’s blouse, to serve us tea leaf salad. It was the hot part of the day in the hottest season, and her husband, a traditional healer; her father, a former driver; and her mother, a tailor, all lounged on the floor nearby. Ma Hlaing’s household was somewhat exceptional in that they had used a landline phone for business before the mobile phone era. Ma Hlaing said that she had personally used a smartphone for two or three years and used Facebook every day. Like most of the phones I saw in the village, hers was a small Chinese model, which she kept charged off a battery linked to solar panels. As I waited impatiently for images to load on groups like “Happy learning for sewing” and “Let’s make beautiful clothes,” she told me she was reducing her use because Facebook was distracting and expensive. She now turned off data and put her phone away while working, which allowed her to reduce credit costs from 20,000 mkk to 5,000 mmk ($15 to $4) a month. As we spoke, our mutual friend Thiri looked over our shoulders at the small screen, directing Ma Hlaing to friend a town resident who posted frequent local news updates and a national celebrity famous for his funny weather forecasts.

Ma Hlaing told me that a friend created her first account to help her find clothing designs and sewing tutorial videos to advance the family tailoring business. After the 2015 floods destroyed the family’s garden, Ma Hlaing used this account to buy seeds for the pagoda flowers. A broker in Mandalay advertised the seeds on an agriculture Facebook group; she communicated with him via Messenger and sent payment on Wave Money. When the plants sickened months later, she used the same Facebook group to get advice about pest eradication by posting photos of the afflicted plants with a caption requesting suggestions for treatment. Talking to Ma Hlaing, I realized that this first Facebook account served primarily as a tool for securing the family’s livelihoods; in referring to the account as for pyinnyaye, Ma Hlaing was referencing not abstract learning but rather specific vocational knowledge and networks that enabled her to advance the family businesses.

Ma Hlaing’s incorporation of social media into household livelihood strategies contrasted with her second account, which she opened a year later to talk with friends and keep up on the news. Ma Hlaing used this account much less frequently and only had about fifteen friends. She drew a tight circle around her online friend group even as it provided an escape from the intense sociality, and almost complete lack of privacy, of her household; although her father and husband used Facebook to watch sports and read news, she told me, in front of them, that she did not friend them online because they would annoy her. Ma Hlaing read local news on “Everything to Know about Kalay” and occasionally about “Mother Suu” (NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi) but did not belong to any religious or political Facebook groups. There was no Facebook group for her Burman village. By cultivating separate accounts, she drew a distinction between her online livelihood strategies and her digital personal life, much like the one a single U.S. white-collar worker might draw between personal activities on LinkedIn and Tinder.

Facebook activities extended gendered livelihood strategies. Ma Hlaing was one of several young women I met in Chin and Burman villages who had joined Facebook groups about sewing to build their tailoring businesses. This digital extension of traditional women’s work contrasted with the male Chin elder described earlier, who reinforced norms linking masculinity to both agricultural production and large machines when he showed his friends a video of the rice reaper. Both male and female villagers used Facebook to learn about farm and off-farm opportunities, find work, and trade. In comparison to the drones and sensors infiltrating fields of the United States (Miles 2019) or the blockchain chicken farms of rural China (Weng 2020), the role of the Internet in Kalay’s agricultural production was modest. Still, Facebook groups, pages, and chats supplemented and extended networks of brokers, retailers, and agricultural extension officers to become key links in livelihood chains. Villagers occasionally followed groups like one titled “Let’s Share the Challenges and Successes of Rice Farming,” which featured posts selling seeds or offering promotions, offering advice on how to use small tractors, grow rice in different seasons, or make organic fertilizer. Facebook also served as a forum for information about migration opportunities. For example, one young Burman farmer I spoke with had joined a Korean language group on Facebook to prepare himself for labor migration. Rural livelihood strategies, often accompanied by a traditional gendered division of labor, increasingly spilled into digital space.

Supporting Community

Mizo Ywa looked different than neighboring Burman villages. Rather than the simple wood or thatch homes, the village’s main street boasted several multistory cement houses, some complete with calendars of “Miss Chin Australia.” Beyond this road were smaller homes surrounded not by rice paddies but by pools of water. After the 2015 floods destroyed most of the rice land, Chin villagers had used capital sent from abroad to create fish ponds, a livelihood that demanded up-front investment but was better suited to flood-prone lands and increasing labor constraints. I held a technology focus group in a home with tiled floors, running water, and photographs of the owner’s children in Australia and Norway. Older participants reported that their children had set up their Facebook accounts and that they used family messenger groups to communicate with children in Korea, New Zealand, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. They also mentioned the International Mizo Ywa Association, a Facebook group that connected local residents to villagers living abroad. A young man explained that the Association had been founded before his time, “in the Gmail era,” so that villagers abroad could fund local poor and community events. The group’s activities were coordinated by a webmaster living in Norway who still handled many of the international financial transfers, but villagers now conducted much of the association business in a Facebook group, whose administrator they selected by an annual vote. Officers of regional chapters—for example, the Mizo Ywa Association USA—were also selected annually and announced on the Facebook group.

Just as outmigration and remittances had spurred Mizo Ywa’s residents to transform the village’s infrastructures and surrounding ecologies, so, too, had they adapted and extended existing community groups into online spaces as an increasing proportion of the population lived far away. The role of online connection in maintaining family ties and place-based identities among diaspora populations is well documented (Miller and Slater 2000; Parham 2004; Bernal 2005; McKay 2006). In this case, Chin villages like Mizo Ywa used social media to build on existing practices that strengthened ties to home while facilitating flows of material aid. In particular, Facebook allowed villagers to expand long-standing traditions of kothukotha, or do-it-yourself development, in a mobile, digital age.

The village Facebook group was a key forum for these collective activities. Whereas the sewing and farming groups mentioned earlier brought together new online publics, village Facebook groups were generally private and served to reinforce an existing, place-based social unit. The most active had several posts per day and thousands of members. In some cases, they were supplemented by additional groups for community development, youth, churches, or diaspora, with titles like “[Village Name] Family in Malaysia” or “[Village Name] Family USA.” Village groups provided platforms to share timely, locally useful information such as weather forecasts, motorcycle sales, and requests for exotic meat. Posts documented daily activities, including village meetings, clean-up campaigns, traffic accidents, funerals, and festivals. One group featured a live watch party, a Facebook feature that allows streaming video, of a worship ceremony at a village church. This video-conferencing of daily life suggested village groups play an important role in keeping nonresident villagers socially, and even spiritually, connected, a point highlighted by several former migrants I interviewed. At the same time, the groups featured faraway job opportunities, public service announcements about migration safety, and translations of common English words. Village Facebook groups were produced by and inseparable from both in situ agrarian life and translocal mobility.

If village Facebook groups served, in part, to supply far-flung migrants with a taste of home, they also provided a powerful platform to encourage support back to the community. Village groups showcased the generosity of members living abroad; for example, in a post expressing appreciation for a donation of cups and money from a young woman working as a maid in Singapore. Cups were a particularly useful cultural object, because Chin villagers would use them to serve chicken soup during funerals, which traditionally lasted one day and one night, during which the community stayed up and sang together. Photographs included in the post showed the cups themselves, the girl’s parents handing over the box and cash to the community group, and the donor smiling under a Singapore skyscraper. After just eighteen hours, the post had elicited 276 likes and forty-nine comments expressing gratitude.

Community donation and development are not new in rural Myanmar, where the historic absence of state support and international aid has meant that kothukotha has long played an important role in creating and maintaining both Burman and minority communities (Griffiths 2019). Facebook did not originate these practices of collective aid; rather, villagers and local leaders used the platform to amplify existing mechanisms of everyday and emergency support. For example, in the absence of effective government response after devastating 2015 monsoon floods, grassroots activists posted photos and requests for aid, coordinating donations from across Myanmar and abroad. In one violent eviction case I followed, community leaders solicited donations, provided updates, and recorded distributions on their Facebook profiles; contributions from Chin communities in Myanmar, Australia, the United States, and Europe were used to purchase rice to feed displaced settlers for months. Among both Christian Chin and Buddhist Burmans, donations collected online were often religious; for example, for the Burman woman who used Facebook Messenger to coordinate with villagers working in Myanmar cities to send money for a local Buddhist festival. Similar forms of online communication and collective action were a key component of emergent forms of grassroots political mobilization.

Mobilizing for Land Justice

One scorching day as we rested between interviews with farmers and former domestic workers, I asked a friend how he got involved with activism. It started with the protest of the Chinese copper mine at Snake Mountain, he told me. That was in 2012 and 2013. He visited the villages, just an hour’s motorcycle drive from his own, and went all the way to the national capital to discuss the matter with members of parliament. When I asked what came next, my friend reached for his phone, saying, “Let me check Facebook.” He had opened his account shortly after the Snake Mountain case. During the 2015 floods, he had posted photographs of the donation receipts and the materials he purchased being used to help survivors. A few years later, he used the platform to campaign for the recognition of Chin ethnic territory, including in private and public messages to elected officials. During his battles, Facebook had helped get his message out. Now, it served as an archive of his activism.

Widespread Internet access remade the terrain of Myanmar politics. This is both because the Myanmar government and the Facebook corporation made the platform essential to national debate and because individual activists like my friend harnessed the platform for grassroots mobilization. Facebook pages for forest and agricultural departments were key sources of information about new regulations; for example, in a post from a provincial department sharing updated instructions and application forms for Community Forests. Elected members of parliament used Facebook profile pages to demonstrate their efforts to constituents, whether through videos of their speeches on the parliamentary floor, lists of local infrastructural improvements written in local ethnic languages, or sharing photos of new roads. Facebook therefore provided opportunities to demand accountability; activists used public comments and private messages to advocate to their representatives on land issues. During the five years of NLD government, organized Facebook pages and campaigns on land issues as well as environment, peace, and gender justice proliferated. After amendments to the Vacant, Fallow, and Virgin Land Law passed in September 2018 to set a six-month deadline to register land, a national land rights network launched a major Facebook campaign to protest the law, complete with colorful and terrifying memes counting down the days until the government would take ancestral lands away from ethnic minorities. At the same time, local organizations posted updates and warnings about the deadline’s implementation in each of Myanmar’s states and divisions. Grassroots activists in my own network posted a steady stream of photographs depicting protests over rice prices or land grabs and evidence of illegal logging. Activists told me that they used private Messenger chats to organize events, and they used public posts to spread advocacy messages, celebrate achievements, and publicize their activities, making it harder for the government to disappear them secretly.

Digital mobilization often leveraged the affordances and reach of Facebook to widely circulate and reinterpret preexisting cultural forms. Some posts adapted satirical cartoons, a genre of political critique with a long history in Myanmar. One image I reviewed depicted Sayar San, a national hero who led the 1930–1932 anticolonial peasant rebellion, asking incredulously, “The agricultural sector has still not developed?!” A terrified farmer with a sickle answered diminutively, “Yes sir, Sayar San.” I found the cartoon posted in a farming Facebook group with more than 78,000 members, accompanied by a long essay titled “Stepped On.” The text shared one farmer’s personal story of struggle, critiqued the government’s neglect of farmers despite the historic importance of agriculture, and bemoaned the lack of machines, fertilizers, and support services. Despite the fact that the group’s description warned against discussing politics, this social critique was authored by a group administrator and sparked active discussion in the comments, including requests for more posts and allegations of government corruption. The relationship between online discussions and sustained social movements is a rich topic for ongoing inquiry (Tufekci 2017), but both centralized social media campaigns and individual posts like this cartoon leveraged Facebook to incite immediate protest and advance alternative values.

Emancipatory appropriations and online agrarian politics, including sharing government news, activist campaigns, and subversive cartoons, must be read within more dangerous trends. In global public discourse, Facebook’s association with violence and hate speech is often exemplified by its role in stoking Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide. Although the causal link between online activity and offline violence is often oversimplified, Myanmar’s particular history and the affordances of the technology make Facebook a powerful space of racialized, and often exclusionary, nation-building (Prasse-Freeman 2021). Less discussed, but perhaps more damning, are the NLD’s insidious efforts to use the Internet as a mechanism to quash dissent. Between 2017 and 2019, the democratically elected government blocked several independent media Web sites and allocated more than $8 million to phone and Internet surveillance (Kyaw 2020). The NLD also enacted Internet blackouts in conflict areas and brought more than 200 cases against activists and journalists under the 2013 Telecommunications Law, most of which were charges of defamation for political critiques on Facebook and all of which resulted in convictions. Since Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, the junta has employed intensifying surveillance tactics and a series of Internet restrictions, including blocking Facebook and disabling mobile phone data, that severely threaten the prospects for democracy and the safety of its supporters.

Across Southeast Asia, increasing online participation has been met with greater state control (Sinpeng 2020). In nearby Cambodia, Beban, Schoenberger, and Lamb (2020) argued that the ruling party’s social media cooptation, along with a 2017 free press crackdown, has silenced rural resistance and enriched elites. Jack et al. (2021) analyzed village officials’ use of Facebook as an incomplete yet effective form of networked authoritarianism. The use of social media to shore up rural repression across the region highlights the limits to grassroots digital mobilization in the context of resurgent authoritarianism. Yet Messenger groups, online campaigns, and personal posts provided important tools for activists working for land justice in Myanmar during the democratic decade. Tensions between the oppressive and emancipatory uses of the Internet are an urgent global issue, and much work remains to be done in evaluating the prospects for digital mobilization against surveillance, censorship, and control in particular contexts. It is clear, however, that Internet connection has shifted the tactics and terrain of rural mobilization. Struggles over land and the future of agriculture are increasingly waged not only in farmers’ fields or government buildings but also across privatized, surveilled virtual space.

Conclusion

This article has both documented and theorized what I call the digital village, a networked social space in which online practices emerge from existing agrarian relations to reconfigure livelihood strategies, rural communities, and political possibilities. The digital village is both an important site of empirical investigation and a strategy for conceptualizing the networked geographies of agrarian change. I showed how relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and generation influenced digital connection, highlighting not a digital divide but rather how existing forms of agrarian difference shaped the ways villagers extended economic, social, and political practices into virtual space. These are dynamic, iterative processes; in an increasingly migratory world, villagers harnessed the technological affordances of Facebook to build a digital village inseparable from both in situ agrarian life and evolving practices of translocal mobility. Starting from particular rural communities, ethnography in the digital village transcends totalizing theories of techno-utopianism on one hand and surveillance capitalism on the other by centering the agrarian histories and social relations that shape the Internet.

This article contributes a theoretical synthesis that makes it possible to consider the role of both digital and agrarian geographies in determining the patterns and significance of connectivity. Although global forces shape the arrival of new technologies, rural people’s creative adaptations are rooted in their embodied histories. Contra the deficit implied in the notion of the digital divide, the digital village is a vibrant, dynamic site of economic, social, and political activities. Situating digital geography in agrarian studies increases the explanatory power of, while also placing new demands on, both bodies of scholarship. The digital village calls for digital geography to move beyond fetishization of the smart city to investigate the histories, processes, and consequences of digitization in the rural Global South. At the same time, it demands that agrarian studies take seriously the ways in which contemporary agrarian questions are increasingly playing out online. Both moves carry the potential not only to redefine objects of analysis but also to unsettle dominant concerns and analytics within these subfields.

Providing an ethnographic view of digitization from villages in northwestern Myanmar also enhances knowledge of how everyday people experienced the country’s democratic turn, with implications for global politics. Although new laws often felt very far away from Kalay, Facebook quickly became a household name in the villages where I worked and was enrolled in longer traditions of making a living and sustaining community. In a moment of democratic possibility, activists leveraged the multimedia capabilities and wide circulation of Facebook to call for more just agrarian futures. In the aftermath of Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, the Internet has become an even more important political terrain, as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok provide vehicles for both surveilling the population and resisting the junta. Such developments are a crucial reminder that the politics of platforms do not stem solely from Silicon Valley but are also embedded in national and local struggles.

Good theory extends an invitation to further empirical investigation. The digital village will look different elsewhere; for example, when smallholders struggle with digital debt in Kenya or social movements coordinate on WhatsApp in Indonesia. The relative importance and coherence of economic, social, and political activities that take place online will vary not only across space but also over time; for example, in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, when digital mobilization was both more difficult and more urgent. As a site of study and conceptual strategy, the digital village calls scholars to ground the digital in specific rural places and to network the geographies of agrarian change. In the midst of growing digital connection and resurgent authoritarianism across the world, analyzing the creative use of new technologies within the constraints set by repressive governments and extractive corporations is urgent scholarly work.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to friends, research assistants and research participants in Myanmar who welcomed and taught me. Maggie Jack and Jenny Goldstein got me interested in studying digital connection. Wendy Wolford, Kendra Kintzi, Andrew Ofstehage, Ryan Nehring, Delilah Griswold, Mike Cary, Ewan Robinson, Karla Pena, Fernando Galeana Rodriguez, Shae Frydenlund, Kendra Strauss, and two anonymous reviewers provided thoughtful and constructive feedback. Nancy Peluso and Desiree Fields provided encouragement and advice on writing theory from their respective kitchen tables.

Additional information

Funding

Research was supported by an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Cornell University. Writing was supported by a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley.

Notes on contributors

Hilary Oliva Faxon

HILARY OLIVA FAXON is a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include struggles for land and democracy in Myanmar and digital transformations in global property, development, and environmental governance.