Moreover, electronic communities provide a sense of common experience and involvement that seems lacking in much of modern society (Komito pp). Most of society today has no problem with the idea of "imagined community," where national solidarity is a projection, on the part of individuals, rather than a practice founded on face-to-face interaction and communication (Komito pp).
Komito points out that it is rare, within any group, that social relations are without conflict, hierarchy and inequality, and no matter how strong the commitment to shared values based on family, kinship or ethnicity, there is negotiation based on conflicting individual interests and concerns (Komito pp). Although collective solidarity is often a goal, it is rarely achieved, because communities are composed not only of people who like each other, but also hate each other, and thus, both co-operate and compete with one another (Komito pp). Komito warns that "one must avoid both technological utopianism that characterizes proponents of electronic moral communities, as well as the technological determinism that is used to deny the possibility of such communities" (Komito pp).
Benedict Anderson writes:
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is 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. 'true' communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined (Anderson pp).
It is assumed that these new technologies, both media and Internet, will bring people closer together and create a global village (Robins pp). Kevin Robins believes that underneath this whole concept is a kind of communitarian agenda extrapolated to a global level "in which people again overcome the barriers of distance and communicate directly...
And Samsung Electronics Co., have worked together to produce a set of phone that can display TV programs (Harrison pp). Thus, no one need ever miss an episode of their favorite television program.
As CNN brings news in "real time" from one end of the globe to the other, and as reruns of Baywatch and the Cosby Show are aired in more and more global markets, the world will begin to increasingly share a common culture, however, imagined. Phrases from Seinfeld episodes, such as, "soup Nazi," "master of my domain," "hello Newman," and "yadda yadda," will be common to people who are far removed from New York culture. Television has united generations and nations, and created new cultures.
Works Cited
Benedict Anderson: The Nation as Imagined Community." The Nationalism
Project. http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/anderson.htm
Bhattacharyya, Jnanabrata. "Theorizing community development."
Journal of the Community Development Society. 7/1/2004;
Globalization is transforming adolescence in the developing world."
Population Briefs. 5/1/2005
Harrison, Crayton. "Texas Instruments, Samsung join forces to produce TV phones." The Dallas Morning News. 5/31/2005.
Komito, Lee. "Virtual Communities: paradise or mirage?"
Department of Library and Information Studies University College Dublin
http://www.ucd.ie/lkomito/virtcomm.htm
Mahendran, Dilan. "Imagined Communities: Benedict Anderson." http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is290-1/s01/TheoriesOfCommunity/anderson-mahendran.htm
Ramachandra, Vinoth. "Worldwide Inc.: when global meets local, who wins."
Sojourners. 4/1/2004;
Robins, Kevin. "Spaces of Global Media NewcastleWPTC -98-06." http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:5gIS3Uj60gsJ:www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%2520papers/WPTC-98-06%2520Robins.pdf+television+as+imagined+community&hl=en
