Rural studies now has a well-established corpus of work exploring how rural spaces and practices become (re)presented within various media and how these representations serve to perpetuate the ‘cultural fantasy’ of the rural idyll. To date, however, there has been a dearth of studies which have considered the role that social media may play within representing rural spaces and activities. The following paper attends to this omission through a consideration of farmers' use of social media and an exploration of how it may be used to document and (re)present their everyday working lives and practices. Drawing on the communicative practice of “working out loud” (WOL) and through analysing 5000 farming tweets, the paper shows how social media may offer a more broadly sourced, grassroots, depiction of rural farming life and examines how farmers assemble a range of sources – including the non-human – in (re)presenting the countryside and revealing the nature of their work. The paper notes how social media might enable farmers to reveal the often-hidden aspects of farm work, share and document practices as well as express and reflect their perspectives in communicating to (and with) farming and non-farming audiences, and how such communicative practices might serve to (re)construct their farming identities.

农村研究现在有一个完善的工作语料库，探索农村空间和实践如何在各种媒体中（重新）呈现，以及这些表现如何使乡村田园诗的“文化幻想”永久化。然而，迄今为止，很少有研究考虑社交媒体在代表农村空间和活动方面可能发挥的作用。下面的论文通过考虑农民对社交媒体的使用以及如何使用社交媒体来记录和（重新）展示他们的日常工作生活和实践来解决这一遗漏。该论文借鉴了“大声锻炼”（WOL）的传播实践，并通过分析 5000 条农业推文，展示了社交媒体如何提供更广泛来源的草根、对农村农业生活的描绘，并研究农民如何在（重新）呈现农村和揭示他们工作的性质时收集一系列来源——包括非人类。该论文指出社交媒体如何使农民能够揭示农业工作中经常隐藏的方面，分享和记录实践，以及表达和反映他们与农业和非农业受众（以及与）交流的观点，以及这种交流如何实践可能有助于（重新）构建他们的农业身份。