This essay bookends the first special issue of essays dedicated to farm media and situates the issue’s contributions within a broader history of media, communications, and agricultural entanglement. The connections between these fields are grounded in what Peters calls “Medium America,” which names the spaces and ideologies most shaped by farming across the middle of the Americas to orient a critical transnational history of farm media. Land grant universities, farmworker movements, and rural communication infrastructure are just a few of the institutions that give shape to Medium America, as are the linguistic inheritances that stitch together these relationships, from broadcasting and academic fields to news feeds and data farms. The future of food and farming grows out of these histories.
BaptistEE (2014) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.
2.
BerryDR (2017) The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
3.
BolterJDGrushinR (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
4.
BordenaveJD (2016) Communication of agricultural innovations in Latin America: the need for new Models. Communication Research3: 2.
5.
BrookeJ (2014) Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6.
DidierE (2020) America by the Numbers: Quantification, Democracy, and the Birth of National Statistics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
GeogheganBD (2013) After kittler: on the cultural techniques of recent German media theory. Theory Culture & Society30: 6.
9.
GeogheganBD (2016) Information. In: PetersB (ed.) Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society & Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 173–183.
10.
GitelmanL (2006) Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
11.
GraeberDWengrowD (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Bristol: Allen Lane.
12.
HallS (1973) Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Discussion paper. University of Birmingham, Birmingham.
13.
HarveyD (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
14.
JohnsonW (2013) River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Belknap Press.
15.
KohlerTSmithMBogaardA, et al. (2017) Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica. Nature551: 619–622.
16.
LabatusB (2021) When We Cease to Understand the World. London: Pushkin Press.
17.
MarxK (1852) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: Die Revolution.
18.
MatternS (2017) Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
19.
MilesC (2019) The Combine will tell the truth: on Precision agriculture and algorithmic rationality. Big Data & Society6: 2053951719849444.
NavarroMGarzaJLO (2020) Early surveys in Latin America and transnational communication research, 1941–1945: Cantril’s discontinued legacy in the Americas. Media History263: 301–315.
22.
ParikkaJ (2016) Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses. Bern: Peter Lang.
23.
PetersJD (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
24.
PetersJD (2015) The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
25.
PooleyJ (2016) James W. Carey and Communication Research: Reputation at the University’s Margins. Bern: Peter Lang.
26.
RanaA (2014) The Two Faces of American Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
27.
RobertsBR (2021) Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
28.
RobertsBRStephensMA (2017) Archipelagic American Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
29.
ScottJC (1999) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
30.
ScottJC (2017) Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
31.
SheehanT (1998) Heidegger and the Nazis. The New York Review of Books35(10): 38–47.
32.
StarosielskiN (2021) Beyond the Sun: embedded solarities and agricultural practice. South Atlantic Quarterly120(1): 13–24.
33.
VismannC (2013) Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty. Theory Culture & Society30(6): 83–93.
34.
Von HilgersP (2012) War Games: A History of War on Paper. Cambridge: MIT Press.
35.
WangX (2020) Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
