ABSTRACT
A central aspect of living in a social world organized around various forms of mass communication, beginning with the printed word but then including the telegraph, fi lm, radio, television, and today the Internet, what Marshall McLuhan (1962) called the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, is that a large proportion of the social network exists in the realm of imagination rather than direct face-to-face contact. As the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once remarked, ‘Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media’ (2000: 1). Life in large-scale, industrialized and urbanized nationstates is such that any sense of having a shared identity beyond the realm of direct contact – as an Australian, French, or American person – is inherently ‘virtual’. People can only know about their fellow citizens in the world of the imagination, the written word, images and sounds conveyed over the mass media, such that a ‘nation-state’ is inherently an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983).
