Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities

Reading pieces like this only further remind me of the importance of studying Marxism and the importance of Marxism in media and cultural studies. I fully agree with the concept of imagined communities, the nations that make up the United Kingdom are very much imagined communities. I myself lived in the same town for 20 years yet I have only ever known a tiny fraction of the people who occupy that town. If anything in the current digital age the imagined community applies even more so, many people I consider friends or know well enough to have personal conversations with don't even live in the same nation as me. If anything imagined communities could be most easily defined as the idea of living together with strangers. You may share your country with millions of people but nearly all of them are strangers to you, if anything does link persons it is certainly not their nationality.

I think imagined communities apply more than anything to people living in their own nation. On the other hand people from the same nation who are living in a foreign land may feel more inclined to get to know each other but that is less to do with nationality and more to do with people sharing things in common, which is often the basis for almost every kind of relationship.

Anderson talks in depth about the formation of wars involving communist nations. Communism is very much founded on the idea of the imagined community, in the Soviet Union the public were made to believe that everything they did was for the benefit of the people, never mind the fact that most people were complete strangers to each other. In that case these citizens of the Soviet Union were each persons imaginary friend, by working you were helping them and in return they would work and help you.

The imagined communities concept makes me think of how my own outlook at life is similar, it is very much built up on the idea that if you work hard it will benefit or help others somehow. Imagined communities is very much the idea of interacting with hypothetical people, people who are just like you and care about the same ideals as you and support your nation as much as you do. As long as we are invited to buy into the idea of national pride and being together as a nation the imagined community shall live on, for better or for worse.

References:
Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined Communities (London: Verso). Chapter 1.