Mapping Communities, Mapping the Internet

Several times in his book, Benedict Anderson mentions the obvious but significant fact that place and environment greatly influence the formation of many imagined communities.

In the chapter “Creole Pioneers,” for instance, he writes that of a community born from “the shared fatality of trans-Atlantic birth” (57). He elaborates on this community of exclusion: “Even though in terms of language, religion, ancestry, or manners [the creole] was largely indistinguishable from the Spain-born Spaniard… Born in the Americas, he could not be a true Spaniard” (58). In “Cultural Roots,” furthermore, the novel El Periquillo Sarniento evokes an imagined community by “fus[ing] the world inside the novel with the world outside… The horizon is clearly bounded: it is that of colonial Mexico” (30). The author of Semarang Hitam also uses “a familiar landscape” (32) to connect print-capitalism with Indonesian nationalism. Again and again we see Anderson emphasize “a territorially specific imagined reality” (122, italics mine).

And indeed, we largely consider nations to be geographically bounded places – or even places, period. This raises the question of imagined communities born on the internet: they have no place, because one can access them from any place. Yet many of the internet’s most substantive and enduring phenomena concern communities engaged in world-building, mimicking the physical and literal sense of place so central to older nations. For example, consider Second Life, the Sims Online, and various MMORPGs, as well as inappropriately place-based online lingo like website, home page, chat room, cyberspace, etc.

My question is this: Is such world-building a positive and necessary act on the part of a given online community, or does it instead mark a transition period as internet users learn to let go of the antiquated concept that place is necessary for community (and even nationalism)? Anderson’s “newspaper reader…is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life” (35-36); but is it maybe out of place for internet communities to be “rooted” as well?

Religion, Class, and the State of the Nation

In the chapter entitled "Creole Pioneers," Anderson discusses several ways in which nationalism, though not a direct successor of broadly defined religious communities, to some degree necessarily usurps similar techniques of subjectification. The pilgrimage emerges as a prime example: in large religious realms, pilgrims are defined as members of a shared community by their orientation towards the same sacred locales, while they are united through communication made possible by the shared language of the religious elite. In nationalist societies, on the other hand, secular pilgrimages are made by civil servants and members of the middle class bureaucracy, who became interchangeable parts in the disciplinary national machinery. I suspect that, for Anderson, the class distinction brought to light by this discussion plays an important role. Indeed, Anderson disagrees with the analysis that nationalist movements must be populist movements that induct the lower classes into political life. On the contrary, he argues that the leaders of the nationalist revolutions include "substantial landowners... merchants, and various types of professional (lawyers, military men, local and provincial functionaries) (48). Despite Anderson's protests, this laundry list certainly reads like the roll call for a nascent middle class. In the examples that follow this statement, nationalism generally emerges as a fundamentally bourgeois ideology.

My question, then, pertains to the present. What does it mean for the nation state when such a unit of identity is defended in the name of religion? After religious leaders lost their status as the elite/intelligentsia, and after the churches lost their position as prominent property holders, did the religious community lose its relevance to subjective identities? What happens when the religious leaders become the ruling middle class, or vice versa? Is there a possibility for a supernational religious community to take precedence over national boundaries, or is this just the ultimate expression of the middle class appropriating the ideological tools of their predecessors?

Is pirated nationalism a bad thing?

I find myself confused about Anderson’s stance toward the modularity, or piratability, of nationalism; this mutability, he says, has resulted in the anomaly of a planned ideological revolution “in a realm barely entering the era of industrial capitalism” (p. 156). He is referring here to the Bolshevik revolution, as well as, by extension, the revolutions of Southeast Asia, noting the contradiction between these countries’ “backwardness” and their forward advancement according to a Marxist theory of history.

Does he imply here that the abstract, transferable model of nationalism has allowed these nations to effectively skip ahead in the process of nation-building, thus resulting (negatively) in the assumed ‘official nationalism’ of post-revolutionaries? Is pirated nationalism, in other words, an inferior (artificial?) version of the historically-determined (organic?) nationalism of Indonesia or the Americas? Or does he see something positive in the ability of “backward” societies to adopt the sophisticated cultural/ideological frameworks of revolution and nationalism?

Can online networks replace national identity?

In many paintings the commissioning patron, in full burgher or noble costume, appears kneeling in adoration alongside the shepherds. What seems incongruous today appeared wholly natural to the eyes of medieval worshipers. We are faced in a world in which the figuring of imagined reality was overwhelmingly visual and aural. Anderson p 23

Because of the increased availability of digital cameras and camera phones, we are returning to an age where imagined reality is constructed visually and aurally. We all recognize this Time cover, that news clip, this youtube video, that presidential speech.

Programs such as photoshop that allow us to insert ourselves or others into famous images (e.g. Bert is evil, Forrest Gump), recall the practices of medieval worshipers that Anderson describes. Unlike Anderson claims, we do still enjoy the somewhat bizarre and self-indulgent practice of seeing ourselves quite literally as part of history.

This narcissism has ballooned into the rise of citizen journalism, blogging and reality TV. Every person has the opportunity to become the producer, recorder and archiver of history. One man caught at ground zero takes out his camera to record the devastation of 9.11, while somewhere and sometime else a student shooter tapes his own hate-filled ramblings to send to a major TV station. Instead of inserting ourselves into pre-existing historical footage, we have begun creating historical footage around ourselves. Finally, unlike the printer-journalist (61), the blogger archives his or her postings, leaving the possibility of ulterior popularity.

Nevertheless, each blogger or citizen journalist generally enjoys only momentary notice. And the online communities we join do not replace our national identities. (There is some interesting research being done by Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis on the link between obesity and social networks. While his original study focused on 'real' networks such as towns and groups of friends, he has begun a second study on virtual networks such as the facebook. If obesity can spread over a virtual, social network, then maybe we should re-evaluate the strength of online social bonds.) When asked how we identify, we still reply I'm an American, or I'm a Canadian, and not, I'm a facebooker, or I'm a myspacer. (Although there was an article in Wired described a UC Berkeley study on class and social networks--apparently popular kids prefer Facebook while geeks turn to MySpace.)

For now, communications technology seems to serve to reinforce national identity--using cell phones to help organize national protests or promote democracy, political blogs, etc.--instead of redefine how we self-categorize.

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