Mediatised Agricultural TechnoEnvironments in Indonesia. Reimagining Embodied Knowledge and Practice in Technological Environments

Abstract Indonesia’s response to the digital era entails both opportunities and challenges and shows how the state and civil society alike navigate through policies and implementations. Mediatisation is affecting more and more areas of life, and Indonesian netizens negotiate and develop everyday practices based on their socio-cultural background and imaginaries that are part of discourses of cultural modernisation. This paper investigates such processes based on a case study on organic agriculture, which represents long-established practices and bodies of knowledge in Indonesia. Farmers’ embodied practices and embodied knowledge are reimagined and given new meaning in Indonesia’s emerging mediated TechnoEnvironments. This reimagining manifests in circular readjustments of state policies and civil society initiatives; the apparent receptiveness of the Indonesian government, however, bears the risk of disembodying longstanding practical knowledge. Based on a systematic review of online reports and presentations between 2014 and 2024, this paper analyses visions of organic agriculture from both government (policy documents) and social movement actors, and how those imaginaries influence each other. The main objective is to show how discourses and imaginaries of organic agriculture are reimagined and negotiated online, to develop a better understanding of new communication dynamics between state and non-state actors in the digital era.