Presentation short abstract

This study investigates how social media platform affordances and algorithmic systems mediate encounters between local, scientific, and peer knowledges among Indonesian smallholder coffee and cacao farmers, using assemblage theory to trace how digital infrastructures shape agricultural practices.

Presentation long abstract

Indonesian smallholder coffee and cacao farmers increasingly engage with social media platforms to access agricultural information, encountering diverse and often conflicting knowledge claims from inherited local traditions, modern scientific recommendations, and peer experiences shared by distant farmers. Yet platforms are not neutral information conduits—their technical architectures, interface designs, and algorithmic curation systems actively participate in shaping which knowledges become visible, credible, and actionable. This research investigates how platform affordances mediate encounters between local knowledges (pengetahuan lokal), scientific knowledges, and peer knowledges, and how these mediations configure farmers' knowledge practices.

Drawing on assemblage theory and relational approaches from science and technology studies and platform studies, the research employs multi-sited ethnography combining in-depth interviews with smallholder farmers across four Indonesian provinces, participant observation of digital practices, and systematic analysis of social media interactions on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The study traces how algorithmic recommendation systems privilege certain knowledge forms, how interface features structure knowledge sharing and evaluation, and how platform-specific socialities shape epistemic authority.

Preliminary fieldwork reveals that platform architectures produce distinctive knowledge assemblages—amplifying visually demonstrable techniques, compressing complex local knowledges into shareable formats, and creating new hierarchies of credibility based on engagement metrics rather than agroecological relevance. The research contributes to understandings of digital agricultural knowledge by foregrounding the active role of platform infrastructures in constituting contemporary farming epistemologies in the Global South.