MST 100 - The History of Media (Canadian Identity & Imagined Communities)

Communication was transformed by changes in:

• Reproduction - more copies

• Circulation - farther reach

• Speed - information moves faster

• Scale - larger audiences

We looked at the evolution of Print → Telegraph → Mass Communication

connecting the territory

19th - century nation-building depended on infrastructure.

• RAILWAYS moved:

  • People

  • Goods

  • Mail

  • Newspapers

  • Information

• Transportation networks became communication networks.

Nation-Building: The National Policy

Canada’s National Policy, 1879

• John A. Macdonald's National Policy emphasized:

  • Protective tariffs

  • Western settlement

  • Transcontinental railway

  • Development of a national economic market

  • The railway was intended to help bind Canada into a cohesive political and economic unit

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities*

Benedict Anderson claimed a nation is“an imagined political community”

• It is imagined because members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members.

• IMAGINED ≠ IMAGINARY

  • The nation is real in its consequences.

  • The community exists through shared imagination.

Imagined - Limited - Sovereign - Community

Anderson described the nation as:

• Imagined - Members imagine a shared connection.

• Limited - Every nation has boundaries.

• Sovereign - The nation claims political self-determination.

• Community - It is imagined as a form of fellowship among members.

Nations have histories too

Nations are not natural or eternal

• Anderson asks:

  • Why did the nation become such a powerful way of imagining community?

• His answer involves changes in:

  • Religion and political authority

  • Language

  • Capitalism

  • Media technology

  • Reading publics

• The nation becomes possible within a particular sociocultural context

Print Capitalism: PRINT + CAPITALLISM + LANGUAGE

Printers operated within a commercial market.

• To reach larger audiences, they increasingly printed in vernacular languages rather than elite languages such as Latin

• This helped create:

  • Larger reading markets

  • More standardized written languages

  • Shared fields of communication

  • New communities of readers

• PRINT CAPITALISM

Print Creates fields of Communication

Before

• Local spoken vernaculars

• elire/sacred languages

Print Capitalism

• Standardized vernacular print

After

• Larger groups can:

• Read the same language

• Encounter the same ideas

• Follow the same stories

• Recognize other readers as part of the same linguistic world

Strangers enter a shared field of communication

A Reading Public

A reading public emerges

• More print → more readers → more demand → more print

People who do not know one another encounter

• the same language • stories • arguments • events

• A public can be made up of strangers

The Newspaper did something strange

YOU READ THE NEWSPAPER ALONE. But at the same time…

• Thousands of other people are reading it too.

• They encounter:

• The same date

• The same events

• The same public figures

• The same stories

You can imagine others reading alongside you.

From reading public to national public

Media do more than move information

• They can help establish:

  • Shared language

  • Shared events

  • Shared public figures

  • Shared stories

  • Shared time

  • Shared points of reference

  • Media can help strangers imagine

• themselves as a “WE.

Growing up Canadian: Media

Media + everyday life + national experience

• What did we see?

  • New media change experiences of distance and connection

  • Media create shared stories, personalities and cultural references

  • People separated by geography can participate in similar media experiences

  • Media become part of people's memories of “growing up Canadian”

• But does sharing media automatically create a national community?