imagined-community

People often give me a puzzled look when I tell them the name of my blog. “Imagined-community?” they say, “What does that mean? Like an imagined community of bloggers?” Well, yes., AND…

That most people don’t know where the term “imagined community” comes from doesn’t surprise me. Unless a person has read up on the development of nationalism in the modern world, especially the work of Benedict Anderson, the term “imagined community” probable won’t mean much. So, in order to shed a little light on my own blog, I thought I would explain a bit about the meaning of my imagined-community.

First, I am playing off a concept coined by Benedict Anderson to explain how nationalism came to be a potent force in the modern world. Most theorists see the development of nationalism as a primarily 19th century European phenomenon that governments and others used to fuel and justify modernization. Attach the state and its people to a set of traits and values and voila, a national identity!

Now Anderson’s theory is a bit different. Anderson examined the decline of Latin as THE language of power as well as the activities of up and comers as they whittled away at the monarchy’s recourse to divine right. Most importantly, Anderson argued that modern nationalism was made possible by the rise of print media, especially newspapers, which provided the medium for all this imagining. The bit in Anderson that has been picked up by SO MANY people, including me, is that nations are, well, imagined, “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Anderson wrote, “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

Now I am not suggesting that anyone die for the blogosphere, but I am playing with the notion that blogging, and the connections that we make here, the values and “style” of this community, are a kind of Andersonian imagined community. I am also playing against the culturally and geographically exclusive communities that find their center in nationalism and national identity.

Graham Lampa takes up this idea in Imagining the Blogosphere: An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing:

To say that the wider blogging community is imagined should not be taken to mean that its very existence is in doubt; indeed, nearly all communities to which human beings belong are imagined in some manner or another. In his pivotal work Imagined Communities (1991), political scientist Benedict Anderson argues “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined.” Although Anderson concerns himself with the rise of nationalism and its particular version of the imagined community, his call to distinguish such communities by “the style in which they are imagined” is a promising framework for analyzing and describing the features of any given imagined community. In the case of the blogosphere, the sense of community is coaxed into existence within the minds of its members in a style that stems from the instant publishing medium itself to create a discursive, transnational, online imagined community.

Anderson (1991) credits the daily newspaper with creating the necessary preconditions for the rise of the modern nation-state; the reading of the morning paper is a “mass ceremony” during which individuals receive information relevant to their lives within the national community. More importantly, the reader imagines that “the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” Bloggers consume information in a similarly ritualistic manner—albeit via computer monitor rather than newsprint. Clicking from link to link replaces flipping from page to page. However, between print journalism and instant-publishing lies a number of key differences that distinguish the style of bloggers’ imagined community. Unlike the profit-driven enterprise of Anderson’s print-capitalism, the economy of the blogosphere is driven by the free dissemination of texts produced by unpaid amateurs. This distinction between the not-for-profit gift economy of the blogosphere and the market economy of the traditional press has been cited by press critic Jay Rosen (2003) as the number one indication that weblog-based journalism represents a substantial shift from the status quo.

For me, this “gift-economy” (how many of you are doing this for money?) is one of the elements of style that I think defines the imagined community of the blogosphere. An emphasis on sharing, which may or may not be reciprocal, not on a $ defined exchange. Blogging is generous.

But there are other things that define the style of the imagined community of the blogosphere.

It’s multilingual. Even local blogs are read & commented on by people from everywhere and anywhere. And while English may be the most blogged language, the wide availability of translation software has made the need for a single unifying language unnecessary. The blogosphere thrives as a multilingual community.

It’s personal. But there is plenty of distance ; ) Unlike reporters and novelists, bloggers put the most intimate details of their lives online and they don’t even attempt to disguise their issues as fiction. And even if we don’t hang our laundry out in cyberspace, our lives are nonetheless reflected in the stories that we tell about our hobbies and homes, our work and towns, our nations and even our global connections. And if we do bare it all, we can still turn off the computer whenever we need to.

It’s responsive. Yes, bloggers can get on their soapboxes (a bit like this post ? ), but much of the time bloggers are responding: to comments, to things that they have experienced, to something they read, to music, to film, to a stale bag of twinkies.

What the heck is an imagined community? Add your own qualities; it’s still up for grabs…