commentary, quote, commentary

I give you a quote within a quote and a comment from a book of commentary on the literature of W.G. Sebald.

“Newspapers were one of the communications technologies that aided the binding together of diverse and geographically dispersed audiences, facilitating the development of nation and national and historical consciousness as newspapers allowed individuals to see themselves in relation wider patterns of ongoing history. Each newspaper-reader, argues Benedict Anderson [in a book published in 1991]:
is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?”

The thought I had when I read the quote was already precisely expressed in the margin by a previous reader, who wrote the words: it’s moved to the www.

Here we are reading and blogging imaginary communities together.