7 The Digital Age and the Social Imaginary

Abstract

Benedict Anderson (1991) first coined the term “imagined communities” in 1983 when the first edition of the publication by the same name came out, and was an instant success with cultural anthropologists. Shortly after the publication of the book and before it caught on with a wider scholarly public, he mused about how anthropologists were more interested in his work than colleagues in his own field, political science. Anderson touched on a couple of key ideas that dramatically impacted how anthropologists thought about culture and society. One was that community and identity are products of the collective imagination. And as such they are always tied up in a process of remembering and forgetting. And secondly, that media is always central to how that social imagination is articulated and disseminated. But even more importantly, media shapes the process of remembering and forgetting that goes into the collective imagination.