FarmVille does what nothing else has, it brings together a massive number of people globally to grow and share food. Despite the predictable backlash, as an experiment in community FarmVille is clearly a success. It demonstrates how much common ground we can find as humans who nurture, and who eat. Quite an achievement.
However, some see FarmVille as the ultimate sell-out. It is dismissed on the grounds that true farming (and perhaps even true community) can only happen offline.
Compare two recent articles:
‘Suddenly, America digs farming‘ in the LATimes, which critiques the FarmVille phenomenon:
There is, to put it mildly, a curious dichotomy in the fact that tens of millions of people are losing sleep over virtual crop rotation while the refrain about Americans’ growing waistlines and junky diet grows louder by the day.
Are we to infer from the FarmVille phenomenon that people are finally switching their allegiances from Swiss rolls by Little Debbie to Swiss chard by Mother Earth? Or does FarmVille simply represent a subculture of Internet-savvy hipsters who, like the agri-hotties on the Huffington Post, say less about what is actually happening than about what some people think is cool at this particular moment?
And ‘Handpicked‘ in the NYTimes, which offers a glowing and very seductive account of the beginnings of the rural and “utopian” Philo Apple Farm:
They began fantasizing about life in the Anderson Valley, a hard-to-reach area in Mendocino County with its own dialect and an economy that runs partly on the barter system. A real estate agent showed Don and Sally a run-down apple farm in Philo that reminded them of “the old Napa.”
“So they called us and asked us if we wanted to be apple farmers,” recalls Karen, one of the Schmitts’ five children. “We said yes! with no hesitation, knowing nothing about it.” The Philo Apple Farm was born.
My takeaway based on these two articles is that the media considers authenticity in farming to be land-based. And in fact it prizes a deep and rooted connection to rural, physical land above all else. But to consider rural farming experiments like those conducted by The Schmitts as more authentic than FarmVille (played by so-called “Internet-savvy hipsters”) is to miss the point, and to miss the zeitgeist.
A ‘physical’ farm is not inherently better than a ‘virtual’ farm. We may need a new way to understand authenticity, a way that is not entirely dependent upon physicality.
November 5, 2009 at 9:53 am |
A “physical” farm is not inherently better than a “virtual” farm?
I must be getting old. I am totally NOT getting the zeitgeist. I think you’re arguing that the food that my physical farm produces is not inherently better than the food-for-thought that a virtual farm produces.
Or something.
November 10, 2009 at 2:16 pm |
When I was young I lived on a farm and raised horses. In early spring the freshly plowed fields smelled sweet of earth, there were warm rain that took away the winter chill and there was promise. A few weeks ago I went to the farmers market in Marin County and bought tomatoes that were ripened by the sun and tasted the way a tomato used to taste picked fresh off the vine. The success of a virtual farm or even a virtual community seems to express a longing that reminds me of my childhood on a farm in a small community called Allegan, Michigan. Perhaps we have moved to far from the land and lost our sense of community. Are we selling out or clamoring for something that we need? I think we are buying into a new world order.