Digital Countryside

Starting from ethnographic researches of the project Erasmus Plus ‘EARTH’ (Biocultural heritage and sustainable territorial development), this article attempts to analyse how poetics concerning rural communities and their mediatic narrations through the new ICT and the digital platforms change, both in Italian contexts – Rete Rurale, Rural4Learning, Vazàpp, some firms in Molise – and in processes of rural and regional development – Bolivia, Argentina. At the same time, communication technologies and digitalization of agriculture are also changing politics and governance of the development and regeneration processes of rural, upland and inner areas: transhumant shepherds, female entrepreneurs and women’s networks, innovative and visionary cooperatives, companies marketing biological products of the territory on digital platforms aimed at joint responsible purchasing groups through ICT in the inner areas of the Southern Apennines, as well as upland depopulated territories in Latin America. Among the rhetorics of participationism and the practical forms of self-organisation through digital networks, a new way of living and working is catching on in rural areas.