ABSTRACT
Media technologies have played fundamental roles in the birth and maintenance as well as different restructuring processes of nations in diverse ways. New technologies, when they have arrived in the past, have paved the way for the media as tools and arenas for nations to use, and around these technologies media users have also gathered in nationally organised communities. The printing press, landscape painting and the novel have all been used as technologies in the service of nation building and state formation, and the media have accordingly long been one of the central ‘cultural technologies of nation-states’ (Bolin 2006), where a national media stock is as symbolically important for the formation of a nation as a national anthem, a flag and a national airline (Billig 1995; Kolstø 2000: 243ff). The media also mark the borders of the national territory in terms of coverage, and work as an arena for the national public sphere. Research on the media and nations, historical as well as contemporary, is not surprisingly a vast and rich field of knowledge. 1 In the recent past, this has especially been obvious in relation to the post-Soviet formation of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe, which are still struggling to ‘find the right place on the map’ (Jakubowitz 2008: 101ff). 2
