Wow I can’t believe i forgot to post on here but last year i did my undergraduate thesis on why fictional depictions of the future either leave out rural areas, or demonize them.
My conclusion was that either they demonize them because they are demonized in the present, or that many authors and people of society think our advancements of the future will be the same as the advancements we made in past human history where population and ideas would bloom in cities and not so much in rural areas.
Think about agricultural societies becoming more popular than hunting-gathering/nomadic lifestyles thus leading to the creation of cities and eventually lending to the industrial revolution which pulled a lot of people out of rural areas into metroplexes and cities around the world. That is what certain people think of as “moving forward” but where is the space for rural areas to grow and change, and not just through loss of population? That’s what my thesis explored and the biggest answer I found was that through a survey of a couple of people, most people thought of rural areas in the past instead of in the present.
While it’s true those areas may not be on the cutting edge of technology or local slang, this doesn’t mean we should ignore them as being strongholds to the past, just as places where information travels slower and, dare I say, at a more natural pace in comparison to cities.
The internet’s response to winter storms in Texas mainly drove me to write this thesis, but it was also the treatment I received in my undergraduate university in New York as a Texan that infuriated me. People who live in big cities, populous regions, and liberal areas like to think of themselves as the majority and that they are a progressive litmus test, but in all the depictions of fictional futures I saw, only a Chobani yogurt commercial presented a positive interpretation of a rural fictional future.
I really do implore y’all to think about the way rurality is treated in all forms of media, whether it’s the over-romanticization present in depictions of a past rurality, the desolation and decimation depicted in future rural areas, or the stereotypes enforced in present-day media about the intelligence, progressiveness, or personality of people who live in rural areas.
There are many different ways to interpret progress, but exclusivity shouldn’t be one of them. When we talk about diversity in fictional content, this should be among the topics of discussion. Granted, my surveys were done in English and Spanish to a mixed US and European audience, plus the timeline for the survey was only a few months before I had to start writing the thesis, but I hope the idea can be explored further by many more people than myself and with much more depth.
