![]() ![]() Most of the global imagined communities are a bequest of the internet revolution political groups, religious sects and media houses are other institutions that 'create imagined communities' across various identity-lines (read: potential fault-lines in a community) and this is especially true for large, heterogeneous countries like India. An open, online platform with its members is a socially constructed community, much like a nation and the concept per se is not novel. The idea of community germinated in distant past and as explained in the seminal book 'Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism' by Benedict Anderson in 1983, a nation is an "imagined political community" and "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion". ![]() ![]() And purposeful online communities based upon common interests, practices fairly neoteric. Long before the all-pervasive and inescapable social media permeated our lives aided by widespread democratization of technology ostensibly providing a semblance of community to its disparate members united purportedly through common goals and values, vestiges of communities with dynastic or religious underpinnings existed since time immemorial but manifestation of a feeling of kinship and community with nation-state as the mainstay is a rather recent phenomenon. ![]()
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