Digital Nature: Everyday social-technical relations and practices within Sweden’s rural agriculture and wild harvesting industries

Digital platforms are fundamentally transforming the way we live, work and play, normalizing everyday digital-social-spatial relations.

The dominant articulation of ‘platform urbanism’ makes one wonder what the social consequences of platformization are in rural areas and the ways digital life in the rural may be theoretically and empirically different.In Sweden, despite high hopes that digital technologies will make the rural competitive and attractive, we know little about social-technical practices and relations in the rural, and how the diverse rural spaces and places are connected to and from platformization.

This project asks: 1) How is digital technology incorporated into everyday social and economic life in specific Swedish rural contexts? 2) How do everyday digitally mediated practices change rural social-technical relations and spatialities? 3) What are the consequences and implications of these relations for regional development? 4) What role does platformization play in normalizing, reproducing or reinforcing social inequalities/divides?Utilizing ethnographic, digital and computational methods, we will explore the questions in three nature-based industries situated in varied Swedish rural contexts – Beekeeping, Organic Farming and Wild Berry Refinement.

This project has strong social relevance by addressing rural development, sustainability, and equality. We further advance this material to theoretically explore the role of rurality in shaping digital relations.