Something I pulled out of this week's article was the idea of imagined communities. This idea was first presented by Benedict Anderson and came about do to the invention of the newspaper. The basic idea of the newspaper creating these "imagined communities" where through the reading of news around the country we are now connected with one another from further distances. The reason Anderson described these new communities as imagined is because the newspaper caused a relationship between unseen others who don't have physical contact with each other.
The imagined community is a very interesting concept. Imagine living years and years ago before newspapers or any form of mass communication and think about how isolated everyone was. You lived within your community or city and had no idea what was going on in other parts of the country. It would take days to weeks just to hear important news from a few states away. But, with the arrival of the newspaper, people from different states were given the opportunity to feel more united with each other despite their physical distance. Now rather than be in the dark about important occurrences nationally, people were able to form these imagined communities of information.
However, now that the technology involved in mass communication has grown and improved, we are even more connected with one another and our imagined communities are even larger. New technology like the internet and television have given us the chance to not only connect with others in our nation, but also with people from all over the world. Additionally, with the invention of things like web chat and messaging system, our distant communities are becoming less and less imagined. We can now put a face to the people we at one point could only imagine even if there is still no physical contact with them.
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