Larry
Stillman*
Caulfield School of Information Technology,
Faculty of Information Technology Monash University
Michael Arnold
Department
of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne
Martin R.
Gibbs
Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne
Christopher
Shepherd
Department of History and Philosophy of Science,
University of Melbourne
This paper is part of an ongoing effort to substantiate the user experience with technology through empirical methods. The ‘technologies’ in this case are in the main, communications technologies. The ‘users’ are five families living in a small town undergoing economic, demographic and climate-related change, and in an important sense the township itself, recognising that the changing characteristics of the township are intertwined with the experience of the five families. The families’ communications experience is read in phenomenological terms, the township’s experience is read in socio-economic and demographic terms, and the technologies’ experience in the hands of the families and the township is read in mediative terms. We seek to provide concrete accounts of particular appropriations of technologies, and rather than proclaim a relationship, describe how these appropriations resource and constrain action in the world, and how this action shapes a relation to the world, in the township of WheatCliffs.2
With a population of less than 500, the township of WheatCliffs sits about 30 minutes drive from the regional centre, itself a medium-sized town of 13,500, and a hard four-hour drive from the capital city of its southern home state. The main road runs through the centre of town, is straight as an arrow, and carries little traffic, not being a trunk route linking anywhere in particular to anywhere else in particular. This description of WheatCliffs could be applied in many ways to what is known as the Australian ‘sheep and wheat belt’—broad horizons, crippling summer heat, and droughts that have always lasted for years at a time, but are commonly thought of now as a permanent condition. When the rains do come, native grasses and flowers thrive, and the wheat farmers plant their crops.
Place is critical to the recent history and future of WheatCliffs. By historical happenstance rather than planning, the town is close to natural features that attract many local and international visitors. WheatCliffs thus becomes an intersection of dynamic multiple connections, physical and electronic, that build presence, identity, representations, social capital and connection locally, regionally and globally.
Population movement from villages to towns, and then from towns to cities, and then on to the formation of megacities, is a long-term phenomenon evident in every place and arguably traceable to antiquity. However, in recent decades in Australia, in a trend sometimes referred to as “counter-urbanisation”, population growth rates in particular coastal and rural locations have been significantly in excess of city growth rates and national growth rates as an average (Champion 1998; Argent and Rolley 2008). Popularly referred to as the “sea change” and “tree change” phenomena, the counter-urbanisation trend became evident in the 1970’s and accelerated in the 1980’s (Gurran and Blakely 2007) and was significant enough to become the subject matter of new magazines, television shows and public policy developments at the Federal level, at the State level, and among individual councils and consortiums of councils (Gurran and Blakely 2007). As the terms “sea change” and “tree change” suggest, lifestyle factors are argued to be prominent motivations for this relatively recent trend rather than traditional labour market factors (Salt 2001), but perhaps counter to a popular view, those moving are not predominantly retirees, and in fact new residents of high growth coastal and rural regions have a younger profile than Australia as a whole (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2004a ; 2004b).
Complementing these gross population movements is another phenomenon which has perhaps been more important in the constitution of WheatCliffs’s demographics than population quantums. The term ‘rural dilution’ was coined by Vince in 1952 (cited in Smailes 2002) to describe a situation in which the social composition of rural populations is altered in significant ways without dramatic changes in population numbers. Rural dilution occurs as those who are directly engaged in primary production, or are directly engaged in providing services to primary producers, have their numbers thinned by technologies and techniques associated with agricultural restructuring and labour shedding. Reductions in government and other institutional services provided to small communities – such as staffed bank branches, staffed post offices, one-teacher schools and the like – exacerbate the problems of agricultural labour shedding, with concomitant flow-on effects accelerating labour-market driven population movement. At the same time though, it can be that an increasing number of people move to and work and live in the community by choice, for reasons of lifestyle rather than vocational necessity. Smailes may well have been writing of WheatCliffs in pointing out that low levels of net migration from a rural community may mask high levels of gross movement in and out, where those moving in and those moving out are strongly differentiated in their demographic and social characteristics (Smailes 2002).
A model that is also relevant to the present and future of WheatCliffs is closely related to counter-urbanisation and rural dilution, but focuses on the changing economic foundations of rural areas rather than population demographics as such (Argent 2002). This so-called “new rurality” (Barkin 2006; Da Veiga 2006) seeks at least a preservation of rural viability and at best a rejuvenation of a perhaps idealised rurality through turning away from a dependence on traditional agricultural infrastructure. This move to achieve a “new rurality” seeks to turn the above-mentioned logic of modernist rurality on its head by promoting diversity of agricultural production, including niche-production; by value-adding to this production; by encouraging a multi-product and multi-service economic base that embraces tourism, recreation, cultural traditions, and ecologically-based economic activities; and in all of this, by encouraging localised political and economic autonomy rather than reliance on centralised subsidy. It asserts that “… the link between agrarianism and rurality is not essential” (Gorman-Murray, Darian-Smith et al. 2008). Examples of new rurality local to the authors are to be found in the Yarra Valley, the Mildura district, and the ‘Golden Triangle’ district in Australia, and of course WheatCliffs.
In economic terms, rural communities have operated within global commodity markets for a long time now, and in cultural terms, rural communities share many of the same cultural products as urban communities. Modernist forms of transport and communications have significantly ameliorated the friction of distance in more affluent nations, and a substantial body of work traces these interconnections (e.g. Webber (1963, 1964a, 1964b, 1968). However, despite these long-standing modes of interconnection, and despite the role of contemporary communications technologies in constituting new forms of co-presence that affirm places like WheatCliffs as part of “the space of flows”, representations of rurality in Australia and elsewhere are often constrained by a conception of rural communities as self-contained and relatively disconnected (Carter, Darian-Smith et al. 2008). As Valentine and Hollway (2001) have observed, rural areas have been characterised in terms of their social and economic marginality, and in terms of their distance to and difference from urban centres. In contrast, rural dilution, the new rurality, and the technologies that are associated with these phenomena, emphasize ongoing modes of overlap and interconnection. The affordances of contemporary technologies, or more accurately, ‘sociotechnical systems’, enable people to come together in new ways while remaining in place — to connect to one another within the community, to connect to urban centres and global flows, to help each other, to find new coping strategies against the adversities of drought, economic hardship, and physical distance.
The idea of ‘sociotechnical systems’ has its origins in the work of Eric Trist. Hitherto overlooked, Trist and others underlined the necessary integration of social and technological elements for efficient organizational design (see for example Trist and Murray 1993). In contemporary STS, ‘sociotechnical’ as adjective, and ‘socio-technology’ as noun, continue to index this integration as well as caution against considering ‘the social’ and ‘the technical’ in isolation. Just as technology affords an imaginative construction of the life worlds of individuals, families, and communities, so too do the latter bring their specific appropriations to technologies. The sociotechnical mediates this intersection of agencies—those of technologies and those of people—in a performative multi-leveled appropriation of material forms, symbolic content, and lived experience. In describing the idiosyncratic and personalized character of multiple sociotechnical assemblages of rural users in WheatCliffs, we appeal to the informants’ own strategies for self-positioning as they negotiate technology in relation to five themes: distance and proximity, work and leisure, connection and disconnection, access and exclusion, and comfort and anxiety.
That then describes the site of this round of fieldwork in our ongoing efforts to learn more about technology in people’s daily lives.
Personal contacts in WheatCliffs were used to identify and select the five families that participated in the study. In selecting families for the study we were looking for people who could act as key informants on life in WheatCliffs, were willing to participate, were articulate, and had diverse family and employment situations. They represented many, but certainly not all configurations of both family and working life in Wheatville. We had participants that ‘worked the land’ and those who worked in town, and some from home. We had participants with family connections in Wheatville going back generations, and those who had arrived within the last decade. All families had children, ranging from the very young to adult children who had left home. Information and communication technology was used by all the families in their day-to-day life. The families are described in more detail in the sections below.
In agreeing to participate in the study, these five families were, in effect, agreeing to become co-researchers or collaborators in our research work. The families were not approached as a source of unprocessed data, but as a source of expert empirical knowledge underpinned by vernacular theories of sociotechnical relations. This was achieved through the use of novel research methods we have successfully deployed in other studies (see Arnold et al. 2006; 2007, Shepherd et al. 2006; 2007), derived from the 'Cultural Probes' of Gaver and his colleagues (Gaver et al., 1999; Gaver et al., 2004), though differing from Gaver in that our method is deployed for the purposes of cooperative data-gathering and analysis rather than cooperative system design (Arnold 2004).
Our approach began with an interview with each family. This first interview included a technology tour of the home, in which participants were invited to show us the various spaces of the home and to describe how those spaces were inhabited and the roles technologies played in the activities conducted in those spaces. Families were then left with a ‘domestic probe pack’ of materials to use to record and interpret their use of ICTs. It comprised maps to trace origins and destinations of communications; colour-coded stickers to record each technology's user and frequency of use; cameras to provide snapshots of the routine and the novel in domestic life; diaries for each family member; and a scrapbook for photos and jottings (see Arnold, 2004). These records provided 'objects to think with' (Papert, 1980), conversation pieces, grist for the mill of conversation between the family members and ourselves, which took place during a subsequent interview conducted a few weeks later. The conversations and the theoretical interpretations of probe-pack traces circulated around family life, life in the home in the context of the town, life in the town in the context of the wider world, and how technologies are used and to what effect.
Empirical “data” at a primary level included probe pack materials such as individual’s diary entries, photographs, and jointly constructed scrapbook pages. Different families, and different participants within each family, responded in their own way to the probe pack materials provided. Those with an artistic inclination sketched and drew pictures in the scrapbooks, sometimes in collaboration with other family members. Others preferred to maintain a diary, written journal, or a logbook of activity. Most used the cameras provided, but not always as we had anticipated. Some of the younger participants started a scrapbook or a diary, but lost interest after a couple of entries, or appropriated the materials for other play activities. All families had one or more members who made substantial effort to use the probe pack materials provided to record aspects of their family life. This involved work, and it was a form of work that could not always be sustained. The specifics of how participants chose to interpret and engage with the probe packs are of secondary importance to the fact that they chose to engage. This engagement gave them opportunity to reflect on their family live, and it gave them material to, literally and metaphorically, place on the table between us and to discuss, question and reflect upon. Thus, at a second level we videotaped conversations with participants during which we jointly interpreted this data and theorised its meaning. The probe pack materials thus became opportunities for discussing issues of concern. Primary and secondary data were then coded by the researchers using grounded-theory-like procedures as originally suggested by Glaser and Strauss (1967). As indicated, five interrelated themes proved central to participants’ appropriation and negotiation of technology. The themes were:
i) distance and proximity. Actors sought to ‘find their place’ in relation to other places, near and far.
ii) work and leisure. In making their place, actors sought to secure convivial work and leisure, and distribute their energies accordingly.
iii) connection and disconnection. Across work and leisure and across more or less public and private realms, actors sought to establish particular modes of connection and disconnection with others—individuals, family members, organizations and so on.
iv) technology access and exclusion. Actors sought choice in the technology available to them, and exercised that choice strategically.
v) comfort and anxiety. As an affect response, actors sought control over ‘the sociotechnical’ (i.e. technologies and people in relation), to minimize hazards, protect privacy, and so forth.
Frank and Ivy Williams migrated to Australia from the UK with all their children many years ago, and selected WheatCliffs because it offered employment, and because of Frank’s passion for nearby recreational opportunities. Frank is a tradesman who has recently retrained as a teacher and Ivy works at a nearby nursing home. Their children are now adults and are no longer living at home.
As late middle-agers, Frank and Ivy spend a lot of time in their sitting room, equipped with the communications media one would expect by contemporary western standards. The Williams are not disconnected from national and global media, except to the extent that they wish to be.
Frank and Ivy do not feel isolated, despite living in a small rural town, and despite their migration and all the dislocation that implies. Ivy explains that WheatCliffs isn’t isolated;
“It’s 15 minutes to the regional centre, it’s really not that far from a major population centre. It’s a tourist attraction too.”3
WheatCliffs isn’t isolated – not because of contemporary communications technologies – but because transport enables embodied presence focused on place. WheatCliffs is distant, but distance does not imply the isolation it once did. The regional centre is only 15 minutes away, akin to a suburban drive to a shopping mall, but with no traffic. The escarpment is near this place, so tourists visit. Overseas visitors come to the town.
ICT’s on their own don’t cut the mustard for the Williams, and so, while our study proposed ICT as our key socio-technology, the Williams were keen to confound us, and emphasise socio-technologies that mediate co-presence – the High Street, the Regional Centre, the overseas visitors – notwithstanding that they have only been back to the UK twice in 25 years. But that is not to say that communications technologies are insignificant. Frank and Ivy make about 8 phone calls a month now to keep in touch with ageing relatives in the UK. These 8 or so calls represent a significant increase in communication among the extended family, as in recent years the price of international calls has dropped dramatically, and telephone affordances have changed radically over a longer term.
But they are clearly of the view that electronic communications have their shortcomings, and that “people often don’t tell you everything over the phone”. So in addition to the regular phone calls, they are also traditional written correspondents. Ivy likes the personal touch of letters, and has a long list of Christmas Cards to work through each year. In Ivy’s remarks we see the typically gendered performance that Wajcman refers to as ‘social labour’ (Wajcman 2008). The job of maintaining relations, keeping people together, personal fence-building and fence-repairing is gendered—it is women’s work to make the phone calls, write the letters, do the inviting, remember the birthdays.
So, while Ivy prefers paper, Frank prefers emails…
“When you get an email you’re a serious composer and answer it straight away, and that’s where I can find the difference. I can sit there and read off what I want to say in bullet points and send it off and it’s done in 10 minutes…you don’t have to put everything in there like you do with a letter.”
The email confronts the letter, and socio-technical infrastructure changes shape in response.
Frank’s frequent use of the computer in his work as a teacher reflects the ambitions of a wide variety of people to use computers to bring contemporary western education to isolated regions. In this, the laptop is sometimes filling a vacuum—providing a capacity for education through communication infrastructure, where previously there was precious little of either—but in other circumstances the laptop is confronting orality, the pencil and the book, and educational globalism is confronting localism.
The binaries that constitute our themes: distance and proximity, connection and disconnection, access and exclusion, may well presuppose a privileged arm of the axis, but defenders of orality, the pencil, the book and the local, may well privilege the other pole of the axis.
Stephen and Jen have 3 daughters, Catherine, Felicity and Mary, who are 12, 15 and 18 respectively. The family are multigenerational farmers who run an extensive property a couple of miles out of WheatCliffs, and in an earlier era Stephen and Jen might have been regarded as “cockies”—the Australian version of “landed gentry”. Jen’s art work—her personal work and her work with local art groups—is pursued through a mix of action at a distance and embodied activities. She remarks that email and telephones make it no hardship to live in WheatCliffs and still remain in the national and international loop in respect of her work. But the focus of activity for the local art groups is the annual festival, a located event in which people gather in the flesh in a particular place at a particular time, and in which this place and the time together is important. Although the festival web-site, email, and the telephone are all important in the pursuit of cultural activity, there is no suggestion that the space of flows can displace or substitute for the space of place. So here we see contemporary digital communications technologies entering a relationship with ancient socio-technologies—the festival, the display, the public place, the community gathering—in order to move to a desired place on the axis of distance and proximity, work and leisure, connection and disconnection, access and exclusion.
Stephen often uses the networked computer to assist with his farming work, in checking the weather, prices, banking or government services and connecting with other farmers and the farmers’ organisation though various lists. Sheep must be dry to be shorn, so even a brief rain-shower can be an expensive disruption, and years ago he became attuned to using the online weather service to be able to make best use of his shearers. He also watches the markets to calculate the best time, place and price to sell his grain or wool. He accesses banking and other government services online, including access to the family’s various social security and educational benefits. He also gets regular email from the Farmers Federation and estimates that about half of the farmers in the country now get their bulletins by email. Stephen is maintaining the Australian rural tradition of relentless technological innovation.
Stephen is also very active on a discussion list to do with vintage cars, and gets a lot of pleasure from being an active reader and occasional participant and purchaser of equipment. The family has also shopped online for things like art supplies and an MP3 player, in another example of the Internet’s capacity to deliver consumers to markets, regardless of where the consumer is.
The children reflect varying capacities in managing their mobile phones as cheaply as possible. Catherine and Felicity are very savvy with one-cent per message SMS phone plans, but still, are always running out of credit. The daughters are frequently in debt to each other, and to their friends, and they owe money to cousins in a provincial town as well. This sharing of knowledge of devices and plans, sharing the use of devices, and sharing communications costs, is another example of the tangential way that mobile phones are implicated in social relations. They are not just relevant in terms of talk and text between friends, they also play a part in friendship networks by being an object that can be loaned, shared (passed around), gifted, subsidised, or maintained.
Mary, the university student, says that she frequently uses email and Internet chat during term time to keep in touch with her family. This is a cheaper option than making long distance or mobile phone calls, and this connection is important for her …
“Just keeping touch with what’s going on at home…missing out on the things that are happening, re-adjusting...on my own, having my own life, having to think about myself again.”
In addition to personal communications, Jen and her eldest daughter Mary also communicate by email about their art. The capacity for collaboration at a distance is of course more important when the distances are great, but less obvious is the point that these technologies are also providing a resource to collaborate about, as well as a resource to collaborate with.
Stephen and Jen are conscious of problems that the girls might encounter going on line—such as pornography and bullying. Like parents all over the Western world, Jen and Stephen are confronted with a new thing to be a parent about, with a new focus for negotiating issues revolving around trust, risk, control, knowledge, ignorance and responsibility. The family is not isolated from all of this, albeit that they are in WheatCliffs, with a dial-up connection.
The family’s television set has not been updated in over 20 years and is of little significance other than providing light relief and diversion. Radio still plays an important part in the family’s life though, with the national broadcaster’s news program starting the day each morning. Stephen drives around his farm utility most days listening to a variety of the national broadcaster’s programs, and Jen often enjoys talk and information programs on the public network at night, rather than music. The national broadcaster is the preferred channel not only for its content, but because it is the only network that is consistently receivable in this part of the country. In terms of national broadcast media the family are connected, though not so in terms of commercial broadcast media, perhaps a mixed blessing. Perhaps, too, radio, and particularly public radio, permeates more strongly, due to its strong portability (on the tractor, by the sink), its minimal cost, and power of its signal where commercial broadcasters have lost interest in small markets. It also serves to create a common discourse between family members or imagined friends.
Len is typical of those responsible for rural dilution. He works part-time for the Shire Council as an arts administrator has completed a PhD by distance education, and is a practicing artist who has installed work in fields throughout the district. His portfolio of part-time work has been assembled by choice rather than by compulsion. Len also settled in this part of the country by deliberate choice, initially for the outdoor opportunties, but now for the cultural diversity and ambience of the lifestyle. Len talks of WheatCliffs and the surrounding district as his “playground”.
Len is part of what is sometimes called a “blended family”; he is separated, but devotes effort to parenting his child, and is also in another relationship. Len describes his circumstances as a positive example of the “modern disrupted family”, and is very conscious that his family situation is not at all unusual these days. His daughter Maggie lives far away with her mother in the state capital, yet they frequently text (“because it is cheap”), and by choosing various freeway routes, Len can get to the other side of the state capital in a few hours, with only seven stop lights all the way. Len thus takes full advantage of changing technologies, strategically mixing and matching new communications technologies with improved transport technologies to make a life that bridges WheatCliffs and the state capital. Rurality does not contain his lifeworld. Visiting is important, but frequency of communication is also important; phatic communication (Vetere et al. 2009) is important—and the low cost of text is one feature that makes this the technology of choice for this purpose. Len points out that another advantage of text messaging is that the text goes straight through to Maggie, without having to pass through Len’s ex-wife. The proliferation of individuated, personalised communications technologies—mobile phones, Internet chat, social networking applications and the like—enable access to people in the home without the knowledge or permission of the matriarch or patriarch, whether in WheatCliffs or the state capital. If it ever was, the home is no longer a sanctuary protecting the family from the world; isolating the family from the world. This capacity to reach into the home to individual members of the family is a cause of anxiety for many, and is often said to exacerbate the problems of parenting, but as we see in Len’s not uncommon circumstances, individuated communications can also facilitate lower-friction parenting. But embodied presence and the opportunity to be in one another’s company is also significant, and so Len travels to the capital, and Maggie also comes to WheatCliffs to stay with Len. The improved motor transport systems are the socio-technologies that make this a practical arrangement.
Marsha and Alex run an organic vegetable growing business with Alex’s father. They have a daughter Sophie, 14, and a son, Dougie, 8. While much of their life goes on around the kitchen table (mediating family life just as it has for generations), newer electronic technologies are not nearly so convivial for Marsha and appear to cause anxiety and discomfort for their effect on family life. Among our 5 families, Marsha was the most critical and most nervous about the agency of communications technologies.
In her 20-odd years in the district Marsha has grown into the community, and in any case,
“We have extremely busy lifestyles. A lot of Alex's family are thousands of miles away in Queensland, a lot of mine are on the other side of the state so it’s very hard to get there. So I guess you have more to do with the local ones than with…you sort of lose contact after a while. So, we have a very diverse community and it has lots of different strings of people.”
And so communications and transport technologies have not enabled Marsha and Alex to maintain close family ties, and Marsha’s personal relationships are now interwoven with those who are local. The limits of communications technologies to mediate relations, and the continuing significance of place, are evident.
The Internet, landline, and mobile phones are very important for their business, particularly on the marketing side rather than on the production side, though mobile phone connectivity for personal activity affects young and old. Almost all their product is sold through the wholesale market in the state capital—about 5 hours drive in Alex’s truck. Consistent with the globalised connectivity of the new rurality, very little is sold locally, and there has been contact with Singapore and Japan with a view to exporting directly to wholesale distributors in those markets. And even Alex’s father, a traditional farmer, has become a frequent user of mobile phones, and is particularly enthusiastic about keeping in touch with Alex and Marsha. Alex and his father often call one another from their respective paddocks. Thus, the convenience of mobile connectivity reduces the constraining geography of farm work, by saving a walk across the fields and over the fences and lost time on the tractor. This connectivity serves to reinforce relationships in the family business even when other family ties, in other parts of the state are weakened.
Ebay has become very important to Marsha, as a source of extra income, and as a place to buy items needed for the household and for the vegetable business. It is also a pleasurable diversion. Sophie’s weapon of choice for communications is her mobile phone, and according to Marsha is an “incessant SMS sender”. Both mother and daughter are aware of the “negative effect” that overuse of these technologies can have on Sophie’s social life and school work. Indicating a different set of consumer priorities, Marsha remarks… “you cannot get them to understand that they are wasting their money, that they could buy clothes, you could save it up for a new outfit”.
Reflecting concerns felt all over the world, Marsha is also concerned about instances of cyberbullying by SMS, and the exposure that her daughter is getting on the Internet, particularly through uploading photos to social websites such as MySpace. “Given how provocative some girl’s pictures can be”, Marsha is worried. Yet Marsha doesn’t quite understand what these sites do, or how they work.
“There are lots of girls dressed up to display, pouting lips and all that…there’s two levels, there’s the girls using it and there’s the boys, getting up on sites they shouldn’t…if you have a daughter that is a concern.”
“I’m actually going around asking people what it means. Every time I walk in the room she covers up the screen. We are having these real privacy issues. But it’s really hard to find out what it means, because a lot of us [parents] are computer illiterate, we’re not using the technology, so you can’t just ring up your friends—when she knows as much as you.”
A reason for the high level of anxiety is not just the perceived level of threat to a child, it is also the opaque nature of the socio-technical phenomena. Its not just that the parents don’t like what is going on, the parents feel they don’t know what is going on, or how it works, and thus experience a loss of control, a sense of helplessness that is not consistent with being a good parent. This loss of control may be a cause of the anxiety, rather than the threat-level as such, belying the notion that rurality of itself provides a safe environment for young people.
Simon and Jane have a small daughter, Phoebe, and Jane is expecting another. Both are in their 30s, were attracted to the town because of outdoor pursuits, and both have a portfolio of associated part-time work, Jane works from home, mixing paid work with child care, while Simon also does a lot of work around the state. Simon and Jane thus provide another example of the changing demographics associated with rural dilution as well-educated, relatively well-off recreationists become permanent residents.
Simon and Jane have lived in WheatCliffs for 4 years now, moving from the state capital. Jane remarks that when she first came here, she actually felt like a migrant coming to a new land, but has found that everything they want is here…
“No, it’s good here, the post office has Giropost, we do all our banking there, its convenient, there’s a pharmacist, there’s the doctor next door, nursing home down the street, kindergarten…”
In another clear reflection of counter-urbanism, rural dilution and the new rurality Simon and Jane point out that they are not alone; that they are part of a younger community that has been attracted to WheatCliffs by the outdoors, by opportunities for business associated with outdoor recreation, and by the lifestyle, “its cheap to live here, you can afford to go on a lot of holidays, that’s what’s attracting a lot of people.” And ironically perhaps, newcomers invoke community… “Many of the people who have moved here don't have extended family in the area, so they develop close relationships among themselves as well as with the older ‘locals’”.
Jane’s mother lives in a regional town about an hour’s drive away, and they use SMS a lot, rather than ringing.
“I think mum would like us to live much closer than we actually do, so it’s mum’s way of not ringing, just dropping a text to see how you are going, or ‘I saw this on the news’.”
“Just being there” is important for intimate relations and the low cost of phone texts mean that it can be used for this sort of phatic messaging, even over long distances (Gibbs et al. 2005).
Other technologies also play varying roles in their lives. For Jane, the national radio network is important, and she listens to the morning current affairs and lifestyle programmes. The radio was given to her many years ago by her father, and she reflects that she uses it “as a sort of conversational thing… just listening to people”, as she looks after her small daughter. Just hearing the human voice is important, and one can well imagine that this is particularly the case in the country where one may be working alone in isolated circumstances for much of the day. It may also be particularly important for the growing and very significant number of single person households in the cities, again collapsing the gap between the city and the country. And so the radio has become an important part of the day. “It’s like being in a café without the people”.
For those of us with an interest in the social studies of technology it is curious that, with notable exceptions (e.g. Bradley 2006), contemporary technologies rarely figure in accounts of life in the new rurality. In the context of this absence we have been concerned to show that the appropriation of technology has rendered rurality increasingly complex, both in our own understanding and in the understanding of our research participants. We point to a new rurality that both retains and upsets the traditional divide attributed to the urban and the rural. As deeper layers of rural practice, livelihood, mobility, and family relations have been successively overlaid by different and modified practices, technology is implicated. We have framed these changes as a combination of rural dilution, counter-urbanization, (Smailes 2002), and trends associated with a de-centred agrarianism and a dynamic “new rurality” (Barkin 2006; da Veiga 2006).
This sociotechnics of the new rurality challenges older ideas of rural townships as economically and culturally marginalized and geographically isolated (Carter, Darian-Smith 2008). Irrespective of whether this “out-of-relation” “old rurality” ever existed in the way it has often been depicted (see Valentine and Hollway 2001) is one question, a “new in-relation rurality” is undeniable. So for example, changes in air-travel socio-technologies through the 1990s and into this century (larger aircraft, the advent of cheap-flight airlines and online booking services, the absence of tax on aircraft fuel, and so forth) made it cheaper for people to visit WheatCliffs from overseas, and they did so. Between the region and the wider world we can see the formation of ramified socio-technical assemblages that make Richard Branson, Google and Stanstead Airport important actors in the world of WheatCliffs, and make towns like WheatCliffs important actors in the world of Richard Branson, Google and Stanstead Airport.
Paradoxically, while transport and communications technologies may each in their own way serve to “collapse space and time” and elide distinctions between modernist rurality and new rurality, urbanity, the city and remote places, accessibility at a distance may also reinforce the sense that all the action is “elsewhere”, and reinforce the sense of isolation in rural communities. Technologies for communication at a distance can foreground the distance and not just the communication, and reinforce the significance of the visit and the cafe.
And as we have seen contemporary communications technologies are part and parcel of the lives of our families, and are shaping the life of the town. There is an argument (James, 1996) to the effect that communications technologies are in fact leading rural communities such as WheatCliffs to become more “abstract”, as distributed electronic connections enable one to be anyplace, and hence no place in particular, with a concomitant effect of devaluing of that which is local, “face-to-face”, and part of the here and now of the small town. We have not found that to be the case in WheatCliffs. The town owes its survival to its place, and the people value the High Street, the pub, the shops, the sports teams, all in their place.
We have seen that technology critiques rural life as it is lived in a material, visceral sense, not through argument. Technology acts in the world: it confronts the practices of day to day life and acts directly upon it, or rather within it, on the basis of that material critique
This performance is material. An interpretation of the significance of this performance may be “read” and the implications of acting in the world may be made “legible” through that performance, but this is not to say that B-Doubles (very large articulated trucks), trains, reservoirs, pipes, tanks and bores and communications technologies are only to be read.
They also act, and indeed, the problem at the heart of the philosophy of technology is the tenuous relation between the reading and the acting. Put in this way it is obvious that one is not the other, and from this two conclusions flow. The first is that the actions are important: that is, it is the very materiality of technology that makes technology a significant and particular object of study. The High Street, the Internet and the Arts Festival are worthy of study for what they do, not for what they say. The second is that an empirical approach that unconceals the acting, that unconceals what they do, is the appropriate approach to the reading of what they do, and is the appropriate approach to translating it into text, such as the example you are reading.
In our empirical work in WheatCliffs we have found “actors in relation” in the High Street, the pub, the café, the post-office, the highway systems, railway systems, telephones, letters and cards, the Internet, mobile phones, landline phones, SMS, MSN, Facebook, the Arts Festival, the escarpment, the camping ground, the farm, and of course, the home.
Viewed on a small scale, where our families are the unit of analysis, these “actors in relation” have provided the focal point from which we access and have represented the day to day lives of our five families. That is, our data are derived from autobiographic accounts provided by “actors in relation”, and by our observations of those actors. We also assert that this is an existential focal point, in that “actors in relation” not only frames an analytical perspective, but also constitutes our experience of the lifeworld. That is, we live our lives in relation to the City, the UK, Art, extended family, the High Street, the escarpment, the phone, the Internet, the Festival et al, and of course, the home.
Viewed on a larger scale, where the whole community is the unit of analysis rather than a family, these “actors in relation” are the phenomena that resource counter-urbanism, rural dilution and the new rurality, and are the phenomena that give expression to the conditions referred to as counter-urbanism, rural dilution and the new rurality.
Viewed at either scale, small or large, our thematic binaries collapse in an entanglement. Our families and their town are proximate, and value their proximity to each other, and the distance that pertains to the capital city, to the region centre, to extended family, to markets, to other cultures, is satisfactorily negotiated by our actors in relation: fields and fences, the highway system, telephones, the Internet.
Work and leisure in our homes, and in respect to the district as a whole, is similarly entangled. Homes are places of leisure and are places of work, and across the district, leisure, in the form of outdoor recreation, camping, art, and lifestyle pursuits, is not only leisure, but is the work of the district, and the culture of the district. The concerns of parents with children who play with technology, and of the children themselves, are collapsed through space and are much the same as parents in cities: parents concerned with exposure to cyber-bullying, porn, overuse of mobile phones, and children concerned with maintaining independence (from parents) and interdependence (with peers).
Lastly, the patchy mix of socio-technical access and inclusion—manifest in the absence of a café, the presence of the Internet, the absence of broadband, the presence of the highway system, the absence of uniform mobile coverage, the presence of SMS and so on—confounds the prospect of drawing hard and fast conclusions about our connected-disconnected axis. Our families and the town are not obviously located at either end of the axis, but in the absence of a given default position, are able to assemble resources that give access and enable connection to be made and maintained to significant others.
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1 The research described here was supported by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery scheme, grant number DP0557781.
2 In the interests of privacy, pseudonyms have been used to refer to all participants and to the name of the town.
3 Unless otherwise stated, all quotes from participants are derived from transcripts of diary entries, or transcripts of videotaped interviews.