I am working on an assignment to do with Communication and we have been asked to focus on the constitutive element of communication.
Without going into too much detail, I was referencing a work by Benedict Anderson called Imagined Communities which talked about the role of communication and communication technology’s roll in nation building.
It discusses ideas of communities being imagined by the communication of the day. That media doesn’t just communicate the community but is very much a part of the community itself. It expands on the very obvious but often overlooked concept that there would be no community without communication. It also discusses elements of Nationalism.
Quite an interesting, if not dry and acedemic read.
But anyway, being written in 1991, it was pre web 2.0, but how well do you think ideas of Nationalism work on the Internet as an ‘Imagined Comunity’
Examples I can think of are well read blogs such as Andrew Bolt’s or the much missed Grod Corp where communities form around URLs. Am I right to draw parallels to nationalsim in this instance?
This is a blog full of questions, because I really do want your ideas more than anything.
Not so much nation, perhaps, as collective/shared identity. You’re a winged monkey or a GrodsReader, for instance. You use turns of phrase, in-jokes, communicate in a certain style, direct your attention to particular issues/topics. If you’d like to compare (and contrast) this relative to nationalism then you’d need to look at the constituent parts – what bits make up nationalism? – and see what similarities there are. I reckon there’d be a few. Perhaps in teh future, imagined communities like the ones you refer to will be the embryos of new nations. Blah.
Nationalism *is* a sense of an imagined community, because it isn’t as if everyone in one nation actually knows everyone else. And because our national identity is part of our whole identity, you can draw a parallel between Nationalism and any other community, imagined or real, which makes up part of one’s whole identity.
To take your example of a blog community – you haven’t met all the other members of that community, yet through shared language/experiences/interests and some kind of contribution to and inclusion in that community (give and take), you feel as if you are a part of it, and may even take pride in that and define yourself as one of its members.
etc
The article talks about the importance of the Newspaper, TV and radio in nation building. That a nation does simply exist and the media communicate that, but the media is an integrated element of the nation and is a part of the creation of community.
Of course, Newspapers and TV are generally limited to a geographical area (such as a nation, state, town) but the internet doesn’t have these restrictions.
I think purely internet based communication has the same community building elements as traditional media. I am curious about how Internet could be considered constitutive in the same way a newspaper is, or if it can be at all.
I use the term ‘nation’ pretty loosely in relation to the internet. Nation being the word used in the Anderson reading. Perhaps community is a better word. But I like the idea of nationalism, is it possible to be loyal to a URL in the same way people are loyal to a country?
Or is it more rational than nationalism?
I am interested by this idea, even if it is silly.
Has you got a reference to the reading?
Yes, I probably should have put it in the blog.
Benedict Anderson (1991), Imagined Communities, London, Verso.
or
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=4mmoZFtCpuoC&lpg=PR5&ots=e54FhF-do9&dq=benedict%20anderson%20imagined%20communities&lr&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
I love Google.