Technosocial configurations for sociability in rural Denmark

Abstract

Abstract The proliferation of ICTs, including social media platforms, has the potential to substantially affect the technological mix that underpins rural sociability. Little is currently known about the practices of technology use emerging from this novel situation. The paper takes steps to address this gap by applying a Foucauldian-inspired mundane technologies perspective to investigate the technosocial configurations for rural sociability after the introduction of social media platforms. Empirically, a mixed-methods approach including a quantitative phone survey and qualitative online ethnography, focusing on community groups on facebook, is used to study three small areas in the Danish countryside. Results show how rural residents employ a mix of embedded and disembedded technologies to inform themselves about social life in their area. Embedded technologies include noticeboards at grocery stores, village halls, and other meeting places; free weekly newspapers, brochures and leaflets delivered by mail; face-to-face interaction (in public spaces, at the workplace, and at home). Disembedded technologies include community websites, mailing lists and newsletters, text messaging chains, and social media platforms. Importantly, technologies are used in complementary combination and a large majority of residents use several technologies. Social media platforms play a major role, but results do not suggest that they have replaced previous practices. Rather, the paper finds that they should be viewed as additions whose integration in the technology mix contributes to an on-going process of incremental reconfiguration. Rural sociability, then, has not been fundamentally reworked by the arrival of social media, although it has brought some changes of note, including the attenuation of local digital divides, the emergence of a new arena for social control, and an unprecedented external visibility of social life in the countryside, where outsiders may gain fragmented glimpses of the local gossip and goings-on.