NATIONS AS MODERN CULTURES
The rise of the technological media coincides historically with the rise of the
nation-state. Far from one being a singular determinant of the other, both
developments entered into a third, long-term shift toward the modernization of
social relations in most areas of human activity. Whereas the scope and current
status of modernization remain debated, its main ingredients are fairly well
established (for an overview see Thompson 1995):
1. Industrialization and capitalization of the material economy, along with a
growing division and rationalization of labor, leading into variable phases
of market competition, incorporation, imperialism, and conglomeration;
2. Democratization and bureaucratization of the institutions and practices
of political representation and government;
3. Secularization of the cultural forms of expression, including the securing
of niches for non- or anti-religious reflexivity, and the recognition of
popular alternatives or complements to the fine arts.
From the outset, the modern nation-state was a contested entity. It
developed, moreover, in conjunction with other nations as part of a new world
economic system, centered in Western Europe. Wallerstein (1974: 348) has
made the point that, in contrast to previous such systems – for example, in the
Middle East or China – this international system of capitalist production and trade
did not grow into an empire in any traditional sense. The modern world system,
taking shape from the sixteenth century to c. 1900, developed as an economic,
not a political entity. Hence, it allowed for, and supported, not only a global division
of labor, but the formation of political structures at the level of the nation-state
(see also Wallerstein 1980, 1989).
In the domain of culture, nation-building was supported by arguments and
narratives concerning the legitimacy of such arrangements, as widely
disseminated by print media. The process of dissemination, in turn, was facilitated
by the fact that these cultural artefacts could be distributed as commodities. More
people – developing into a mass public – moved above the level of subsistence,
and became able and willing to pay for mediated experiences.
Anderson (1991) has offered the helpful notion of ‘imagined communities’ to
characterize nations not only in terms of geography and constitutions, but as
cultural and discursive formations. In one sense, all communities, from face-to-
face to virtual interaction, are, to a degree, imagined (Jensen 2001). Anderson
(1991), however, described in further detail the many forms of mediated
communication which came to serve as means of symbolic control and repair
within nations – from newspapers and novels, to museums, maps, and the
census. Moreover, he noted the role of print technologies in stabilizing and
enforcing national languages, over and above the sacred languages of scripture,
and as means of collective selfdefinition.
The media did not only help to replace religious frames of reference with
national ones, and to question the status of ‘divine’ rulers. The media also became
unprecedented resources for redefining the future – for oneself and for society. If
historical time and its subjects were no longer subordinated to a divine
cosmology, then the future presented itself as an open field of action, both for
individuals and for social interest groups. The future had to be made. It is this
inherent openness which some theorists have identified as the essence of
modernity (Berman 1982; Giddens 1991; Huyssen 1986), recognizing, as well,
that openness is a source of existential uncertainty and perhaps ambivalence. It
is this same openness which media have been called upon as institutions to
interpret, with the nation as the new center of an imagined universe.
