Perceived Impacts and Challenges of Agricultural Information on Short-Form Video Platforms as Rural Infrastructure

Paper Title

Perceived Impacts and Challenges of Agricultural Information on Short-Form Video Platforms as Rural Infrastructure

Publication Info

• Topic area: The role of short-form video platforms (SVSPs) in agricultural production as digital infrastructure.
• Keywords: Short-form video platforms, rural infrastructure, agriculture, digital media, platform logics, rural computing, misinformation, market linkages, algorithmic mediation, rural development.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing research on SVSPs has focused on their social and cultural impacts, with limited understanding of their role in agricultural production. Farmers face challenges like fragmented information, irrelevant content, and platform-driven barriers.
• Significance: Understanding how SVSPs support or hinder agricultural practices is critical for improving rural productivity, livelihoods, and the design of inclusive digital infrastructures.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies have shown that SVSPs lower barriers to learning and market participation but also create challenges like misinformation and accessibility gaps. This paper addresses the gap by examining how SVSPs function as agricultural infrastructure across production stages.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with 20 farmers to investigate how SVSPs assist agricultural production and the challenges they introduce.
• Novelty:
  1. Examines SVSPs as digital infrastructure in the agricultural domain, focusing on micro-level processes.
  2. Identifies how SVSPs support planning, management, protection, and sales in farming.
  3. Highlights challenges like misinformation, irrelevant content, and barriers to participation.
  4. Proposes design recommendations for more context-aware and inclusive SVSPs.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted semi-structured interviews with farmers engaged in crop, livestock, and aquaculture production.
  • Applied thematic analysis to identify patterns in how SVSPs assist and challenge agricultural practices.
  • Explored farmers’ perceptions of SVSPs across four production stages: planning, establishment, protection, and sales.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • SVSPs assist farmers by expanding access to new varieties, providing cross-regional market insights, enabling passive discovery of management knowledge, improving problem-solving precision, and facilitating market linkages.
  • Challenges include redundant and irrelevant content, limited depth of short videos, exaggerated promotional claims, and rising thresholds for effective marketing participation.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • SVSPs reduce geographic and informational constraints, offer timely problem-solving resources, and create new opportunities for direct marketing compared to traditional methods.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Data collected from 20 farmers in China, representing diverse agricultural products and scales.
  • Thematic analysis revealed recurring patterns of SVSP use and challenges across production stages.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Regional focus on China limits generalizability to other contexts.
  • Reliance on self-reported data introduces potential biases.
  • Future research should include longitudinal studies and explore design interventions for better alignment with agricultural needs.

Summary

This study investigates how short-form video platforms (SVSPs) function as digital infrastructure for agricultural production. It finds that SVSPs assist farmers in planning, management, protection, and sales but also introduce challenges like misinformation, irrelevant content, and barriers to participation. Based on qualitative interviews with 20 farmers, the study highlights the dual role of SVSPs as both enablers and constraints in farming. The findings inform design recommendations for more context-aware, inclusive, and sustainable SVSPs to better support rural agriculture.