Imagined communities

…in fact all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness but by the style in which they are imagined. (Anderson, 1983, p. 6)

Anderson coined the term “imagined community” in his work on the rise of the nation state in 1800. His central thesis is that print capitalism made it possible for people from different dialects to understand each other and thus imagine a connection to the state-as-a-community through a common language. In “a world in which figuring the imagined was overwhelmingly visual and aural” (p.

23), textual representation, in the form of the novel and the newspaper, provided the technical means for imagining a community as large as a nation state. An-derson (1983) proposed that the nation is an imagined political community, and despite inequalities and exploitations, it is always conceived as a “deep, hori-zontal comradeship” (p. 7). In this sense community could be conceived as “a living dream or linking image”–as the union of dream and reality (Maffesoli, 1996, p. 88).

The emphasis on the written makes the notion of imagined community high-ly valuable for understanding globalhigh-ly stretched open source projects that feed on digital media. However, Anderson’s preoccupation with print communica-tion in enabling the imaginary has been criticized. According to Wogan (2001, p. 10), Anderson’s account is based on popular linguistic ideologies, that is, the dichotomy between print and oral, and the assumption that nations must be monolingual. Imagining a community surely belongs also to the realm of oral communication. However, Wogan’s distinction is unfruitful in the world of open source communities and digital media, in which the oral is mostly

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pressed through text³³. In this sense digital media (information and communica-tion technologies) can be seen as a continuacommunica-tion of the printing press or “Guten-berg’s galaxy” (Castells, 1996, p. 358). Further, embedded in Anderson’s notion of imagined community is the assumption of a common language. This raises the question: is shared language a prerequisite for a sense of community and communion? Here “shared language” refers to actual different written/spoken languages. For instance people who do not necessarily speak the same language are localizing the OpenOffice.org product in native language projects into hundreds of languages. The official language on the overall project’s front page is English. How, if at all, does this divide between languages articulate into a shared sense of community? What and whose text is the integrating force of the community? Hence, issues of authorship and power become necessary in contemplating the boundaries of the community.

Cohen (1985) has found that people become most sensitive to their own cul-ture when they encounter others’, which means that their attitudes toward their culture are best found at its boundaries. He emphasizes the experience of the individual in community life and the symbolic construction of the community:

Symbols are effective because they are imprecise, though obviously not content-less, part of their meaning is ‘subjective’. They are, therefore, ideal media through which people can speak a ‘common language‘, be-have in apparently same ways, participate in the ‘same’ rituals, pray to the ‘same’ gods…(Cohen, 1985, p. 21)

It is precisely this distinction between superficiality of structural form and the profundity of its conceptualization which validates the argument that structures imported into a community do not necessarily undermine the community’s nor blur its distinctiveness. (Cohen, 1985, p. 75)

Interested and enchanted by the imaginary of everyday life, Maffesoli (1996, p.

57) describes the postmodern hedonistic tribal community as an emotional experience that “cannot be reduced to a single sphere of private, but is lived collectively to an ever greater extent”. He believes that “sense of communion”

can be illusory. What matters is belief in communication. The postmodern community forms around an image constructed according to a certain style–the

“communitarian style”–, and in this process the role of the media is crucial. The interaction between myths and rationality comes to life through the gradual rationalizing of myths.

33 While the digital media nowadays also enable study of visual and aural communication, the data of this study, and the dominant form of communication of the research site, is digital print.

41 The community as a collective representation plays an important symbolic role (Maffesoli, 1996; Cohen, 1985; Delanty, 2010). While symbols and myths can be seen as integrating forces in community, they can also be seen as rhetori-cal and strategic devices for convincing different audiences depending on the intentions of the writer/speaker. The community as an object and product has to be sold: ”There is no product without an image that makes it be known and allows it to be disseminated and sold” (Maffesoli, 1996, p. 107). For example in the OpenOffice.org community, despite the self-selection of tasks by the contri-butors, the Community Manager is on the constant lookout for new members.

Hence, it is important that the image of the community appeal to the values and images of a variety of audiences.

Because it is physically and cognitively impossible to be active at the same time in many communities, members have to bring life into them by imagining.

Imagining is powerful tool for orienting to the future for any member of a community. The following passage by Maffesoli (1996) nicely captures the power of an image/social representation:

The image is…truly a “forming form” – of the individual certainly, the image itself but also the whole social ensemble that is structured thanks to and by means of the images it gives itself and that it must regularly re-collect. ( p. 97)

The alterity at the hearth of “I”, and in consequence, at the heart of the social as a whole, should be understood in this [ambiguous] way…It is this ambiguity, constitutive of contemporary modernity, that characterizes the style of our era and that may invite us to choose a communicational approach to subjectivity” ….The fusional ‘we’ takes on importance anew, as a concatenation of “we’s”, through which twirls each person (persona), multiple in itself. (p. 61).

In his trilogy The Information Society, Castells (1996) sees communities as evolving, highly specialized interpersonal networks. These new communities are essentially informational and communicative (Delanty, 2010; Rheingold, 2000), and they are based on weak ties and low transactions costs (Castells, 1996). Castells (1996) describes the postmodern information society as depict-ing a move from the Gutenberg’s galaxy to McLuhan’s galaxy, that is, from a world of one-way communication to a world of interaction and many-to-many communication. Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) has most likely transformed sociality in its mediatedness and immediateness in the sense that one quickly receives a response to ones’ questions, but this does not mean that the open source community is an unreal place, as the word “virtual community”

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designates. Castells’s (1996) idea of “the culture of real virtuality”, essentially mediated through symbols, is appealing:

……while the media have become globally interconnected, and programs and messages circulate in the global network, we are not living in a glob-al village, but in customized cottages globglob-ally produced and locglob-ally dis-tributed…there is no separation between reality and symbolic representa-tion: …virtual: being so in practice though not strictly or in name “, and

“real: actually existing Thus reality as experienced has always been vir-tual because it is always perceived through symbols that frame practice with some meaning that escapes their strict semantic definition. (p. 372) Hence, there is no distinct virtual place as such on the Net, but rather a commu-nicative and mental space where traces of the self are left through the act of writing. The Net and virtuality could be viewed more as a state of mind in that

“the sense of place requires an act of imagination” (Rheingold, 2000, p. 21) Delanty’s (2010) notion of “communication communities” sketches a view of communities as a place where new cultural codes and forms of belonging emerge, but what these forms of belonging are, is not discussed. However, valuable in his idea is the emphasis on communication, and that community exists in many forms and often these forms complement each other.

The discursive-rhetorical approach developed in the next chapter seeks to establish a connection between real communities vs. imagined communities³⁴, and the division between communities as structure and objective reality and communities as content and a sense of communion. Further, related dichotomies such as local vs. global, practice vs. promise, individualism/self-interest vs.

communitarian/altruism, voluntarism vs. paid work, are also explored. Recon-structing the links between these distinctions makes it possible to see the

“postmodern community” (Maffesoli, 1996) of the “information age” (Castells, 1996) in its complexity: to see what is old and what is new–what is borrowed, recycled and newly combined. As Lehtonen aptly (2000) points out, communi-ties have not disappeared; they have just gained different forms.

4.1.5 Summary of the four community concepts as resources for