Still here,online: Platformed temporalities of abandonment in northwest Bulgarian villages

Study area and case selection

Case selection follows a purposive sampling strategy oriented to theoretical replication rather than statistical representation. Northwest Bulgaria is one of the most persistently marginalised regions in the European Union and has experienced intense rural depopulation and agricultural restructuring since the late socialist period. ³⁸ The region is characterised by small settlements dispersed across agricultural lowlands, declining public transport provision, uneven road connections to municipal centres and long standing dependence on nearby towns for health care, administration and secondary schooling. Here, abandonment is experienced through distance from services, interrupted mobility and the gradual withdrawal of infrastructures that once connected villages to wider state and cooperative systems.

Within this region, the study focuses on two small settlements, here given the pseudonyms Belograd Plain and Vidin Ridge. Both are former collective farm centres that have lost most of their permanent population and now consist mainly of elderly residents, scattered second homes and degraded socialist infrastructures. They were selected because they exhibit high levels of land abandonment in the surrounding territories ³⁹ but also maintain active digitally mediated connections through Facebook groups, messaging channels and local history pages frequented by migrants and seasonal returnees. Comparing these two sites makes it possible to examine how different local trajectories of deindustrialisation and agrarian change shape the ways temporal loss and endurance are articulated in digital space. ⁴⁰ To preserve anonymity, the article uses pseudonyms and avoids precise village coordinates.

Data collection

The digital field is conceptualised not as a single platform but as a constellation of overlapping contextual and meta fields in Airoldi’s terms. ⁴¹ Contextual fields are anchored in specific local communities, such as village Facebook groups dedicated to Belograd Plain and Vidin Ridge, municipal information pages, and YouTube channels documenting local events. Meta fields are constituted by dispersed digital traces that coalesce around shared tags, toponyms or visual motifs that refer to the two villages and their surroundings but are posted across platforms by geographically dispersed users. ⁴² These fields were identified through iterative keyword searches in Bulgarian, snowball exploration of linked groups and pages, and recommendations from participants. This approach follows recent methodological reflections that treat digital fields as fluid yet empirically traceable configurations rather than static locales. ⁴³

Data collection combined sustained online participant observation, semi structured interviews and on site ethnographic visits. The digital component involved twelve months of engagement, from January to December 2023, within the two main village Facebook groups, associated Messenger chats and selected public pages. The researcher created a research profile, introduced the study to group administrators, and requested permission to join closed spaces where appropriate, following best practice in digital ethnography. ⁴⁴ Daily observation cycles followed discussions around topics such as abandoned houses for sale, photographs of overgrown fields, invitations to memorial services and nostalgic reminiscences of socialist era collective life. Field notes documented not only textual content but also posting rhythms, comment dynamics and the affective tones of interaction. ⁴⁵ Screenshots and platform export tools were used to archive posts and comment threads, while avoiding the indiscriminate harvesting of data that has been criticised in digital trace research. ⁴⁶

Online engagement was complemented by semi structured interviews with thirty two participants who were recruited through a combination of direct messaging, referrals from group administrators and snowball sampling. Participants included current residents, seasonal returnees, former cooperative workers now living in Bulgarian cities and emigrants in other European countries. Interviews were conducted via video calls, voice messages and text chat, depending on participant preference and connectivity constraints. They focused on personal trajectories of departure or return, everyday experiences of living with abandonment, practices of digital participation and interpretations of specific posts or images from the observed groups. This multi modal interview strategy reflects recent innovations in digital ethnography that seek to align methods with participants’ own communicative repertoires. ⁴⁷ Interviews were not treated simply as supplementary evidence but as interpretive material that helped explain how participants understood the posts, images and silences observed online.

Two extended field visits to Belograd Plain and Vidin Ridge took place during the spring and autumn of 2023. During these visits the researcher stayed in locally rented accommodation, participated in everyday routines such as market days and church festivals, and undertook walk along interviews that followed participants’ preferred paths through abandoned farm complexes, empty housing streets and overgrown irrigation canals. These embodied encounters allowed the researcher to attend to material textures and sensory atmospheres that are only partially visible online and to compare them with the visual framings circulating in digital space. ⁴⁸ Field visits therefore provided a spatial check on the digital material, allowing online representations of ruined buildings, empty streets and repair efforts to be situated in relation to actual infrastructures, distances and everyday routes.

The resulting corpus (Table 1) consists of approximately eighteen hundred archived social media posts and comment threads that explicitly reference the two settlements, more than sixty hours of online observation notes, thirty two interview transcripts and two hundred pages of field notes from the on site visits. Data management followed a case centred strategy. All materials were imported into qualitative analysis software and organised into project folders for each village, with cross cutting folders for thematic domains such as memories of socialist modernity, narratives of decline, digital repair practices and visual aesthetics of abandonment. ⁴⁹

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Table 1.

Study corpus and the analytical role of each data source.

Data source	Quantity/period	Analytical role
Facebook posts and comment threads	Approx. 1,800, January–December 2023	Visual motifs, public memory, conflict, repair practices
Online observation notes	60+ hours	Posting rhythms, silences, comment dynamics, affective tone
Semi structured interviews	32 participants	Biographical interpretation, resident/returnee/emigrant perspectives
On site field notes	Two visits; approx. 200 pages	Material grounding, sensory context, comparison with online framings

Data analysis

Data analysis employed reflexive thematic analysis as articulated by Braun and Clarke ⁵⁰ and further elaborated in methodological discussions of rigour and trustworthiness in qualitative research. ⁵¹ Initial familiarisation involved repeated reading of interview transcripts and field notes and the sequential review of archived posts, while making analytic memos about emergent patterns and surprising disjunctures between online and offline accounts. A first cycle of coding attended to descriptive features such as temporal markers, spatial references, affective language and visual motifs. A second cycle developed more interpretive codes that captured relational processes, including negotiations over responsibility for abandonment, contests over the value of socialist infrastructures and practices of digitally mediated caretaking. Themes were gradually constructed by clustering codes across data types, with explicit attention to how certain motifs stretched across platforms while others remained anchored in specific places or social groups. ⁵² Reflexive memos documented how the researcher’s own assumptions shaped coding decisions, in line with recommendations for transparent and trustworthy thematic analysis. ⁵³

The coding process generated three overarching themes that structure the findings: visual grammars of abandonment, memory and mourning, and platformed temporal rhythms. These themes were developed by comparing how similar objects and events, such as schools, cooperative buildings, deaths, festivals, service visits and media attention, appeared across posts, interviews and field notes. Visual grammars emerged from repeated images and captions of damaged infrastructures and empty streets. Memory and mourning emerged from posts and interviews that linked people, buildings and socialist era practices to present loss. Platformed temporal rhythms emerged from attention to recurrence, acceleration and silence in the groups. The themes were therefore not treated as isolated topics but as three dimensions of platformed temporality: visual repetition, commemorative recurrence and rhythmic reactivation.

Ethics, positionality and limitations

Throughout the project, particular care was given to positionality and ethics in a small region where online spaces are tightly interwoven with dense social networks. Reflexive work involved continuous reflection on how this position facilitated certain disclosures while limiting others, especially in relation to contentious recollections of socialist collectivisation and post socialist privatisation. ⁵⁴ Ethical practice followed evolving guidance on digital ethnography with vulnerable populations and contentious online communities. ⁵⁵ For public Facebook pages and open groups, posts were treated as publicly accessible but still subject to contextual integrity, meaning that potentially identifiable content was paraphrased rather than directly quoted unless explicit consent was obtained. For closed groups and private chats, informed consent was sought from administrators and individual participants, pseudonyms were used for both persons and places, and identifying details were obscured. The researcher announced their presence and role in group descriptions and periodically reminded participants of the ongoing study, thereby resisting purely observational lurking and aligning with arguments for transparent and situated digital ethnographic practice. ⁵⁶

The study also has methodological limitations. Because the digital field was centred mainly on Facebook and related messaging practices, it necessarily privileges actors who are digitally connected, socially visible and willing to participate in online village publics. The perspectives of residents who do not use social media, who rely on relatives for digital communication, or who avoid public discussion are less fully represented. Platform algorithms, group moderation and uneven connectivity may also have shaped which posts became visible and which silences were interpreted as meaningful. The anonymisation of the two villages protects participants but limits the geographical specificity that can be provided. These limits mean that the study does not claim to represent rural Bulgaria as a whole; instead, it develops an analytically grounded account of how abandonment is digitally mediated in two closely studied postsocialist rural settlements.

Visual grammars of abandonment in Belograd Plain and Vidin Ridge

This section examines the first dimension of platformed temporality: the visual repetition through which ruined or declining infrastructures become evidence, memory objects and aestheticised signs of abandonment. The visual material circulating around Belograd Plain and Vidin Ridge does not simply document decline. It organises who and what is seen, and it stabilises a particular way of knowing these villages as abandoned yet still claimed. Across platforms, photographs and videos repeat a restricted set of motifs, but these motifs are arranged differently by current residents, dispersed villagers and outside visitors. The result is a shared but contested visual grammar that locates the villages within a specific temporal order and distributes responsibility for abandonment across different actors.

Images posted by remaining residents are dominated by close views of concrete damage. Cracked walls, broken water taps, the empty bus stop, the locked doors of the former cooperative office appear again and again. These photographs often crop out the larger landscape and emphasise immediate obstacles to everyday life. One resident of Belograd Plain sends a picture of a collapsed bridge over the irrigation canal and writes simply, ‘This is why the ambulance does not come.’ Here the image functions as evidence in an ongoing claim, tying visible deterioration directly to a present injury rather than to an abstract story about the past. In comment threads under similar posts, neighbours extend the frame verbally by adding dates of closure, recounting who last tried to repair the structure and predicting when the next failure will occur.

Dispersed villagers and seasonal returnees tend to post wider shots that situate the village in a broader landscape. Panorama views show the whole settlement from a nearby hill, or drone footage glides over the main street at sunset. These images rarely focus on specific broken objects. Instead, they stage a contrast between the beauty of the surrounding fields and the emptiness of the built environment. A widely shared drone video of Vidin Ridge begins with mist over the river plain, then descends over the roof of the abandoned school before panning across a line of houses with closed shutters. The accompanying caption reads, ‘Everything is still and nothing moves, only memories.’ In such posts, the visual grammar shifts from documenting immediate obstacles to tracing a more expansive sense of temporal distance. The emptiness of the street is emphasised by the absence of people, parked cars or animals, and the image invites viewers to remember earlier, livelier scenes that are no longer visible.

Urban visitors and amateur explorers contribute a different strand to this visual field. Their photographs concentrate on interiors and details that are less accessible to older residents, such as peeling murals in the school, rusting machinery in the former cooperative yard or a coat still hanging in a wardrobe in an abandoned house. The camera lingers on textures, colours and traces of former domestic life. Captions often foreground feelings of fascination or melancholy wonder. One visitor writes under a picture of a deserted classroom, ‘As if the pupils left only yesterday, but the spiders are already in charge.’ These images detach the ruins from immediate local grievances and fold them into a broader aesthetic of discovery and decay that circulates through online communities beyond the region.

Across all three groups of producers, a shared visual vocabulary emerges. Certain objects become iconic markers of abandonment. The school building, the cooperative silo, the memorial monument and the shop with a permanently closed metal shutter appear so frequently that their depiction no longer requires explanation. At the same time, each group uses these objects to tell a different temporal story. For residents, the worn school steps are evidence in ongoing complaints about the loss of public services. For dispersed villagers, the same steps are a trigger for layered recollection of childhood and youth. For visitors, they become a symbol of a different era, often presented without reference to current struggles in the settlement. The same material sites thus carry overlapping yet distinct temporal burdens, and conflicts surface when these burdens are perceived to be misused or ignored. The same ruin is therefore platformed as present injury, remembered past and aesthetic object. Abandonment appears here not as a stable visual condition but as a contested temporal framing produced through circulation, captioning and response.

Memory, mourning and small futures in digital village life

The second dimension of platformed temporality is commemorative recurrence: the repeated return to people, buildings and events that slows disappearance by naming, archiving and reactivating attachments. Nostalgic posts rarely present memory as a simple return to a golden past. A common format is a photograph from a school celebration or harvest festival, uploaded by someone who has long since moved to Sofia or abroad, accompanied by a prompt such as ‘Who remembers the grape harvest in eighty eight’ or ‘Write your class and year.’ Responses quickly extend beyond reminiscence. In one thread, former classmates begin by identifying themselves and end up reconstructing the chronology of the school’s decline, debating whether the decisive moment was the closure of the boarding section or the dismissal of a beloved teacher. Others use the same image to insist that ‘we were not poor then’ or that ‘life was hard but full.’ Through these exchanges, the past is sorted and evaluated. Socialist era collective practices, the cooperative canteen, the cultural centre and the village football team are alternately framed as symbols of dignity, hardship or state control.

Digital mourning practices intensify this temporal labour. Almost every death of an elderly resident is marked in the groups by an image of the person, often at a family table or in front of their house, accompanied by a short text about their contribution to village life. Comment threads fill with candles, prayer emojis and brief stories that locate the deceased within wider webs of kinship and labour. When one of the last permanent shopkeepers in Vidin Ridge died, a member now living in Germany wrote, ‘Without him the street will never be the same, he kept the light on for all of us.’ Others responded by recalling credit notebooks, late night conversations and informal care for children whose parents worked abroad. Through such posts, the passing of an individual is scaled up to signify the passing of a particular way of holding the village together. At the same time, these acts of commemoration refuse the idea that the dead simply vanish into statistics of depopulation. They are named, remembered and reinserted into a shared narrative, even when mourners are scattered across several countries.

The groups also host forms of anticipatory mourning that focus on buildings and infrastructures rather than people. Members speak of the school, the cultural centre or the church as if they were ageing relatives whose decline must be watched and dignified. Photo updates on the condition of these structures tend to attract comments such as ‘Every year I fear this will be the last time I see it standing.’ In these conversations, attachment is expressed through a mix of sorrow and resigned care. People acknowledge that they cannot stop the rain from entering through broken roofs, yet they insist on bearing witness and on recording each stage of deterioration. The digital record becomes a way to accompany the slow dying of the village and to reassure one another that this dying is seen and shared, not suffered in isolation.

Alongside mourning, there is persistent work of small repair and future making that circulates almost entirely through digital channels. Fundraising posts for the repainting of a war memorial, the repair of a chapel roof or the installation of a new bench in the square appear regularly, often initiated by migrants or seasonal returnees rather than by current residents. The amounts requested are modest and the goals concrete. In Belograd Plain, a group of former pupils organised a collection to fix the broken bell in the school yard so that it could ring again on the village holiday, even though the building itself remains closed. Participants described this as ‘doing something so the children of our children know we were here.’ These initiatives rarely promise a full revival of the village. Instead they sketch very specific futures, such as a safer cemetery path for elderly residents or a restored cross that will outlive the last believer. These practices do not overcome abandonment, but they alter its duration and moral texture. Through repeated acts of remembering, mourning and modest repair, the groups produce custodial futures in which the village is not restored as a whole but particular people, objects and places are kept within a shared horizon of care.

Platformed temporal rhythms of abandonment

The third dimension of platformed temporality is rhythmic: abandonment becomes perceptible through cycles of return, ordinary routines, sudden accelerations and unsettling silences. Temporal rhythms in the digital life of Belograd Plain and Vidin Ridge are shaped by a patterned alternation between intense activity and long stretches of quiet. These rhythms are not random. They reflect how people distribute attention, care and anxiety across the calendar and across different stages of abandonment. The groups feel most alive at certain moments of the year, during specific local events and at points when outside interest briefly turns toward the villages. At other times, the absence of posts becomes itself a sign that life is thinning out. Platform features, personal habits and infrastructural constraints combine to produce a distinctive sense of time that is hard to perceive from the material landscape alone.

Annual cycles are especially visible around religious and civic holidays, as well as around the village patron saint days. In the weeks before these dates, the groups fill with practical questions, invitations and logistical updates. People ask who will come back and who can offer transport from cities or from airports. Old photographs of processions, dances and communal meals circulate, followed by new images when the events finally take place. Even those who cannot travel mark their presence digitally, writing comments such as ‘I will light a candle here at the same hour’ or ‘Send us videos from the square.’ These periods condense multiple temporal layers. Participants recall what festivals looked like in earlier decades, describe the more modest present celebrations and project hopes that the tradition will continue at least one more year. The group timeline mirrors this layering, with older posts resurfacing through platform reminders, prompting people to compare this year to those archived memories.

There are also weekly and daily rhythms that relate to the routines of those who still live in the villages. Residents post more often on days when public services or mobile shops arrive. A photograph of the minibus that brings groceries every Thursday, or a short video of the nurse visiting the health post on Monday morning, can attract a cluster of comments from former residents who remember similar routines or who worry about how long such services will continue. In interviews, elderly inhabitants describe posting in the evening, after the television news, as a way to signal that they are still there. One woman in Belograd Plain explained, ‘If I put a picture of the sunset, my son writes to me and I know he saw that I am fine.’ Here, the digital rhythm of daily posting renders visible a fragile continuity of life in the village and organizes cross border care.

Taken together, the findings show that platformed temporalities of abandonment operate through visual, commemorative and rhythmic forms. Images make ruins legible as evidence, memory and aesthetic object; posts of mourning and repair keep people and infrastructures socially present; and rhythms of activity and silence make abandonment feel accelerated, paused or temporarily reversed. The villages therefore appear not simply as depopulated places represented online, but as places whose unfinished endings are actively organised through platformed social life.

Platformed temporalities of abandonment

The findings show that abandonment in Belograd Plain and Vidin Ridge is not a simple state of loss but an ongoing, contested temporal process that is organised through digital as well as material forms. Work on ruination has emphasised how ruined infrastructures condense overlapping temporalities of modernist promise, crisis and residual hope, especially in sites where futures have been repeatedly deferred. ⁵⁷ Building on this literature, the article has proposed the concept of platformed temporalities of abandonment to describe how digital infrastructures, interfaces and everyday practices organise the timing of rural decline. The concept refers to three interconnected processes: visual repetition, through which damaged infrastructures become evidence, memory objects and aestheticised ruins; commemorative recurrence, through which people, buildings and events are repeatedly named and reinserted into village life; and rhythmic reactivation, through which holidays, service routines, media attention and silences make abandonment feel accelerated, paused or temporarily reversed.

In the Bulgarian case, those temporalities are rearticulated through social media practices that stage the villages as both finished and unfinished. Visual grammars of cracked bridges, closed schools and empty streets align with classic images of rural decline, yet the comment threads and circulation of these images keep open a horizon of accountability and attachment. Platforms therefore do not simply represent abandonment after it has occurred. They help produce abandonment as a lived temporal condition by shaping when decline becomes visible, who is called to respond, and how long people and infrastructures remain socially present after their everyday functions have weakened.

Rethinking ruination through digital rurality

This argument builds on but also extends cultural geographic accounts of ruination. Stoler’s understanding of ruination as an active and ongoing condition is useful for interpreting abandonment in these villages as something continually reproduced through infrastructural withdrawal, demographic ageing and uneven responsibility rather than as a completed end point. ⁵⁸ DeSilvey’s ⁵⁹ work on decay further helps to understand the forms of care that accompany loss, while Edensor’s work on ruins clarifies how derelict spaces gather affect, memory and alternative temporal orders. De Jong and Valente Quinn ⁶⁰ describe temporalities of ruination and regeneration in African infrastructures as a constant recapitulation of modernist futures that never fully arrive yet are never fully abandoned. Kovač and Ramella ⁶¹ describe promised and suspended futures in Kenyan urban ruins, where people inhabit rubble as both a reminder of broken commitments and a resource for alternative future making.

In Belograd Plain and Vidin Ridge, similar tensions emerge, but they are mediated by digital images and platforms that allow absentees to participate in local ruination from afar. Drone panoramas, interior ruin photography and resident snapshots organise who can define what the ruins mean. Residents use close images of damaged infrastructures to assert ongoing claims on state institutions, while returnees frame wide panoramas as invitations to nostalgic recollection and visitors aestheticise interiors for broader online publics. The contribution here is to show that ruination is not only encountered in place but also circulated, archived and contested across platformed publics. Digital rurality is therefore not only about rural visibility, identity or development. In depopulating villages, it is also about the mediated duration of endings.

This pluralisation of ruin meaning complicates the distinction between material and digital ruins. Miller and Garcia ⁶² conceptualise digital ruins as abandoned virtual environments that remain visually intact but have lost their social vitality, existing in what they call an eternal present of disconnection. The cases examined here invert that relation. The ruins are materially decaying, but their social vitality is intermittently extended through digital circulation. A collapsed bridge, a closed school or a shuttered shop becomes more than a sign of loss when it is photographed, commented on, remembered, disputed or attached to a repair campaign. Memory and mourning practices observed in the groups also extend debates on place attachment and digitalisation in rural regions. Birnbaum et al. ⁶³ show that digital projects can translate and transform place attachment by allowing dispersed publics to curate narratives and images of rural areas, often with the aim of fostering regional identity. These practices suggest a form of digitalised place attachment that is oriented as much to the dignified ending of a way of life as to its revitalisation.

The small repair projects and fundraising campaigns circulating through the groups speak to ongoing debates about digital rural futures. Reviews of digital rural studies note that research has often focused on connectivity, hubs and entrepreneurial innovation, while downplaying the everyday and affective dimensions of digital participation in marginal regions. ⁶⁴ In the Bulgarian case, digital participation is oriented less to economic innovation and more to what might be called custodial futures. Initiatives to repaint a monument, repair a chapel roof or make a cemetery path safer do not aspire to reverse depopulation or attract investment. Instead they seek to secure specific, limited futures for certain sites and practices, often justified with reference to past generations and imagined descendants. This shifts the question of rural digital futures away from revival alone and toward modest practices of maintenance, witnessing and selective repair.

The rhythmic patterns of posting, which intensify around holidays, village festivals, deaths and media attention, contribute to the growing discussion of the digital mundane in geography. Leszczynski ⁶⁵ argues that the digital mundane consists of ordinary digital practices that both shape and are shaped by everyday spatialities, and calls for attention to those routine interactions that rarely appear in spectacular narratives of platform power. Lundberg ⁶⁶ extends this by showing how mundane engagements with digital technologies co produce public space, often without actors explicitly noticing the digital dimensions of their experience. The findings here act as temporal anchors that reassure distant relatives, confirm that basic services still operate and signal that the village has not yet crossed an imagined threshold of final abandonment. In this sense, platformed temporality is also made through low intensity practices of checking in, reposting, commenting and waiting.