101 Culture

In trying to work out what on earth a digital culture might look like, it seems wise to focus well away from social media, twotter and Google Valley.

So what might a farm look like in the digital age? Well after tea and chat with @FarmArtist, I got inspired about the idea of a culturally digital farm. Given previous thoughts, I'd expect a digital farm to be very collaborative, distributed in structure, somehow involve aggregation and probably not have very high walls.

And then a whole bunch of things fell together. I volunteer with Food Up Front, a south London urban food growing network. It works for local food growing much like Facebook does for socialising. I recently went to London Yields, an exhibition on the possible future of urban agriculture. Lots of concept buildings, hydroponics and roof gardens. @FarmArtist told me about Fordhall organic farm whose tenants were under threat from Muller Dairy. 8000 people collaborated to purchase the land and extend a 100 year lease to the tenants.

So if a definition of the farm is a 'workplace consisting of farm buildings and cultivated land as a unit' then what does digital culture bring to that concept? How could a farm be digital? Well it's probably just the unit that has changed. It used to be in one space. But a digital farm would likely be distributed over a wider area, farmed or funded by many and then the produce aggregated together somehow. And that reminds of that brilliant SF project, MyFarm, the 'decentralized urban farm' which sells boxes of vegetables grown in back gardens. And then in today's Springwise email there's Veggie Trader, an online marketplace for homegrown surplus food. Wonderful.