Abstract

ROSHWALD, Aviel. Comunidades fracturadas Una relectura de Benedict Anderson a través del prisma de las redes sociales. Prismas [online]. 2023, vol.27, n.2, pp.325-332.  Epub Dec 06, 2023. ISSN 1852-0499.

Fractured communities: a re-reading of Benedict Anderson through the prism of social networks

For Benedict Anderson, the imagined community of the nation could give millions of people who would never know one another in person a sense of mutual connection and shared fate. Yet in practice, the sentiment of common nationhood and the utopian qualities of nationalist visions could only go so far in compensating for, let alone alleviating, the grind of most people’s daily existence, or in addressing social inequalities. Today, in the age of surveillance capitalism, people may be left all the more frustrated at the disjuncture between the constant mutual affirmation they experience in their fragmented online communities and their inability to have their way in the political and economic spheres and in their offline existences. This may be contributing to people’s inclination to question the legitimacy of electoral politics and the acceptability of political compromise. The myth of the nation as a whole that is greater than its parts may become ever more divorced from people’s lived experience, leading either to alienation from the very idea of nationhood or to radically exclusionary conceptions of it.

Keywords : Imagined communities; Print capitalism; Social media; Political polarization; Surveillance capitalism.

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