Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

imagined community media n. a group whose ties of solidarity are based not upon routine contact and propinquity but primarily upon a shared and imagined sense of membership. Whereas the traditional definition of community applies most easily to spatially circumscribed and local entities, such as the village, neighborhood, parish, or school, in which members recognize each other by name or appearance, an imagined community transcends these local particulars to form a fellowship in which members may never know or meet or even hear of their fellow-members but in which all may feel that they equally belong. The term was introduced by the Anglo-American political philosopher Benedict Anderson (1936-) to characterize the special mode of belonging enabled by the modern nation state. Indeed, for him the nation is the prototypical case of an imagined community: “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”. So strong is this sense of identification that “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 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.” While Anderson’s work was principally concerned with historical conditions underlying the rise of the modern nation stage, the notion of the imagined community has enjoyed wide currency beyond his particular historical inquiry. => virtual community. mmo

immediacy media n. an effect of live television when the event is presented as if unfolding in the here and now without the intervention of a mediating agency. mmo