readers and characters become a the diffuse address of the novel—its typical third “we”: person narrative—creates a general sense of nearness, rather than a targeted and responsive connection. Newspapers, through their regularly planned obsolescence, create so that, reading a newspaper in the privacy of her daily “extraordinary mass ceremonies,” own is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being home, “each communicant replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the Imagined synchronous slightest notion.” mass actions create an imagined community, in which the are transformed multiple “I’s” every morning into a that moves together through time, hence KONY 2012’s “we” invocation of the New York Times. Newspapers, however, are not what they used to be; as the early twenty-first century crisis in print publications has made clear, can no longer be certain of these “we” extraordinary mass ceremonies, if ever could. From both perspectives—the intimate “we” and the global—the notion of a national seems quaint at best, even as it persists in “we” our imagining of the global (think again of figure 2 from the previous section, the image of the earth/U.S.A.). This provokes the obvious question: does this mean the death of imagined communities? Rather than participate in the long and endless debate over whether new media enable or destroy communities—whether they create new online communities or alienated, disconnected individuals; whether they create hordes or empowered networked individuals—this book focuses on new media as generating imagined networks. These networks generate a rather than and modulated “you,” “we,” temporally by asynchronous habits and crises, rather than mass synchronous ceremonies. Collective habits, such as reading the paper, still matter, but they matter and collect
readers and characters become a “we”: the diffuse address of the novel—its typical third person narrative—creates a general sense of nearness, rather than a targeted and responsive connection. Newspapers, through their regularly planned obsolescence, create daily “extraordinary mass ceremonies,” so that, reading a newspaper in the privacy of her own home, “each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” Imagined synchronous mass actions create an imagined community, in which the multiple “I’s” are transformed every morning into a “we” that moves together through time, hence KONY 2012’s invocation of the New York Times. Newspapers, however, are not what they used to be; as the early twenty-first century crisis in print publications has made clear, “we” can no longer be certain of these extraordinary mass ceremonies, if “we” ever could. From both perspectives—the intimate and the global—the notion of a national “we” seems quaint at best, even as it persists in our imagining of the global (think again of figure 2 from the previous section, the image of the earth/U.S.A.). This provokes the obvious question: does this mean the death of imagined communities? Rather than participate in the long and endless debate over whether new media enable or destroy communities—whether they create new online communities or alienated, disconnected individuals; whether they create hordes or empowered networked individuals—this book focuses on new media as generating imagined networks. These networks generate a “you,” rather than “we,” and modulated temporally by asynchronous habits and crises, rather than mass synchronous ceremonies. Collective habits, such as reading the paper, still matter, but they matter and collect
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