What creates a national community? In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that a nation is a limited, sovereign, and imagined community where every person believes they are in a “horizontal comradeship”: a shared fraternal community, within the nation’s borders.
However, Imagined Communities was published in 1983, before the widespread public use of the World Wide Web. With the Internet Age creating a new layer of social and political communication that supersedes geographic and sovereign boundaries and drastically increases the surface area for people-to-people connections, does Anderson’s concept of nations as imagined communities still apply?
The Internet both strengthens and weakens the imagined communities of nations, even fostering bonds across defined national boundaries—depending on a population’s access to a free internet.
Although Western nations initially believed that sovereign attempts to control the Internet would fail, as exemplified by President Bill Clinton’s 2000 speech at SAIS claiming that China’s Internet crackdown was “like trying to nail Jello to the wall,” the modern splinternet and its porous censorship has allowed the internet, to some extent, to coexist within traditional conceptions of borders and sovereignty.
Anderson’s concept is thus useful in our understanding of current questions of political identify and populism, as exemplified by trends in China and the US. Internet restrictions have played a key role in shaping national identity within mainland China, and, likewise, unfettered internet access in the United States has directly influenced the imagination of national unity through online politicization and cyberspace capitalism.
In Imagined Communities, Anderson describes the creation of nations as possible because traditional sources of identity eroded in the eighteenth century, including religion, and societies sought new ways to connect fraternity and power by creating a shared history.
Prior to the concept of a nation, religious communities used sacred languages such as Latin to indoctrinate populations and create a sense of shared history and fraternity. Clergy were the gatekeepers of this shared community because they could read and communicate the word of God via their understanding of Latin, consolidating their power over the community of believers.
With the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century challenging the clergy’s monopolization of religious interpretation, literacy became more widely sought and achieved. Anderson explains that from this, print capitalism arose, the process by which dialects were assembled into printed languages, making them accessible to broader audiences and profitable to the market.
He further argues that this print capitalism laid the groundwork for national consciousness by creating unified fields of communication above local dialects but below Latin, standardizing vernaculars into national languages, and thereby enabling mass communication and literacy. This allowed growing populations to imagine themselves as part of a larger, shared community and fostered a shared linguistic identity necessary for nationalism.
The shared literacy and ability to communicate en masse create the foundation for what Anderson defines as a nation. He explains that a nation is imagined, as most of its members will never know most of their fellow citizens, yet they perceive themselves as part of a shared community.
A nation is also limited by defined boundaries beyond which other nations exist. It is sovereign because divine-right monarchies (being both religious communities and dynastic realms) were replaced by Enlightenment ideals via revolutions, deprioritizing religion and monarchies in favor of liberal ideals such as equality and rule by the people but retaining earlier notions of sovereignty.
Anderson notes that nations are envisioned as communities because, despite real inequalities among the people, there is still a desire among the population for “horizontal” fraternity. In essence, he argues that nations are new advents that claim old histories, mirroring a religious community’s method to assert control over its population.
The Internet was initially conceived by its Western creators as the ultimate guarantor of democratic values. Its ubiquitous nature was thought to be unstoppable, unfilterable, and therefore could carry liberal ideals and democratic norms to authoritarian nations, inspiring democratic revolutions worldwide.
However, this is clearly not the case today, as countries such as China, Iran, and North Korea have created their own Internet ecosystems that restrict outside content and therefore resist outside influence. In China’s case, the so-called Great Firewall of Chinese satellites, servers, and filtration technologies blocks internet flow to and from the outside world, reinforcing the “limited” and specifically delineated national boundary that Anderson describes.
However, this restriction also creates a high surface area for intra-country connections. WeChat, for example, is standardized across the country, creating an online community that Chinese citizens are required to be a part of to play a part in real-world activities, including payment, billing, or even accessing government functions like health check appointments.
These restrictions on outside content and reinforced digital structures of control to connect the population to the state and each other reinforce Anderson’s concept of an imagined community.
The Chinese state is able to encourage nationalism and a shared idea of Chinese identity through propaganda deployed via Chinese internet structures that reach the entire population, and the Chinese population can imagine themselves as netizens — part of a shared community of Chinese citizens online, most of whom will never know each other or meet in person.
The Chinese state’s censorship of information it finds harmful to social harmony — the Chinese people’s conception of themselves as a united nation — is filtered or blocked from both external and internal sources. This demonstrated sovereignty over the Internet is a core tenet of the Chinese Communist Party’s beliefs regarding global cyberspace governance, and functions as Anderson initially conceived sovereignty would regarding geographic boundaries, but in the digital sphere.
The Chinese government aims to make the geographic boundaries of what it conceives as the Chinese nation — boundaries that remain disputed but which the state claims as territories belonging to a shared history (Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, etc.) — also applicable in cyberspace.
However, Taiwan remains outside of the “Great Firewall” and is open to outside ideas, which means the PRC must deploy influence operations and propaganda through external-facing Internet channels to reach Taiwanese audiences. The competition for ideas regarding what constitutes a Chinese nation and if Taiwan is really a part of this nation, as well as a lack of censorship on the free Internet, weakens PRC influence over Taiwanese audiences to accept a unified Chinese national identity.
Anderson emphasizes that a sense of horizontal fraternity is crucial to national identity, a bond that Chinese internet platforms have actively cultivated. The recent influx of foreign users into some of these spaces has triggered an outsized reaction that reveals the extent to which Chinese digital communities are homogeneous.
For instance, Xiaohongshu (RedNote), initially a China-specific application, has attracted a growing number of American users who gain traction simply for being foreign. The strong response from Chinese users — ranging from curiosity to resistance — underscores how deeply entrenched the platform’s sense of Chinese-specific community is, making the presence of outsiders particularly disruptive.
With free, unfettered access to the Internet and multiple platforms vying for usage, the Western internet space hosts fragmented communities that democratic states have difficulty controlling.Anderson’s idea of imagined national communities is not as prominent in Western states during the Internet Age, as democratic nation-states do not necessarily exert the same locus of control over platforms, servers, and technologies of the Internet as China and some authoritarian states do.
Sovereignty is not a defining factor of the Internet in the United States, and neither is the limitation of the Internet’s boundaries, thereby weakening the sovereignty and limited-nation aspects of Anderson’s framework.
On the free and open Internet propagated by Western society, human psychology and algorithms work in tandem to create information bubbles that recommend content aligned with user views. This creates community online, but not necessarily among Americans as a whole.
For example, some Americans may feel a closer kinship with those across national borders who agree with their political views than with their American compatriots of a different political orientation (i.e. pro-choice Americans feeling a shared community with pro-choice Europeans).
With so many different news sources and online forums catering to nuanced political views on the free internet, it can be exceedingly difficult for individual Americans to consider themselves as part of one nation, especially when they may strongly disagree with positions and ideologies coming from other Americans within the online space.
This is not to say that Chinese people cannot also feel more community with those across borders than their neighbors, just that the nature of the Chinese Internet makes it harder to do so because a state-controlled Internet means that the idea of China as one nation is explicitly fostered.
We can draw parallels between Anderson’s process argument of print capitalism facilitating imagined community and digital capitalism fueling fragmented community in the Internet Age. Print shops tailored their products to the market.
When the market was higher for books that everyone could read and understand and more money was made from common-language books, print shops stopped producing prints designed for the Latin elite. This is similar to today’s situation with the Internet in America.
The polarization of the online space seems tied to its commercialization in America, as algorithms recommend a never-ending stream of content that encourages users to continue purchasing or subscribing to specific content, and internet companies use these data preferences to fuel content streams for profit.
This system exacerbates national divisions and creates fierce political tension between Americans with different beliefs, who may even make claims that those they disagree with are not part of their America. Left- and right-leaning Americans have made use of slogan phrases such as “Not My President” in reference to President Donald J. Trump and former President Joseph R. Biden, demonstrating the depth of political fragmentation and undermining Anderson’s framework of nations as based on “imagined communities.”
Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities remains a powerful lens for understanding how nations are socially constructed, but the Internet Age demands a reexamination of its tenets.
The nature and impact of imagined communities today is influenced by how digital infrastructure is governed—whether it is centralized and curated like in China, or open and commodified like in the U.S. In either case, the imagination of the nation persists, but its contours are increasingly shaped by the architecture of the Internet.
The Internet Age has not erased the imagined community; it has transformed it, complicating the boundaries of belonging and reshaping the ways in which people relate to the idea of the nation.
Edited by: Ari Fahimi