mtl3p

After the presentation (that went incredibly well) I met with Liss Jeffrey from the McLuhan Global Research Network the next day. She’s a prof at UofT, but she wanted to meet regarding her project eCommons:

“The eCommons/agora is a national not for profit created to close digital divides by creating a community of learning and practice to use open source tools wherever possible, in order to develop community online and off-line, create cultural content, and foster citizen engagement.”

Mir and I heard her talk about eCommons at last year’s Summer Program.

Caveat: This is my rendition of some of what we jazzed about. Any glarring stupidities probably belong to me.

She was saying that eCommons was a “pan-canadian” site -or at least aims to be- and she wanted to think of ways in which IleSansFil (or TorontoSansFil) could work with that kind of project. She wanted to know whether we were just committed to working on the “hyper-local” or whether projects with this kind of breadth interested us.

I have personally been very excited in the capabilities that several canadian wifi groups would have to syndicate and pass on information and allow for exchange between cities and provinces, but as a group our manadate is fairly montreal specific and that the project would probably have to benefit our operations in montreal (or at least Quebec) in some way (not necessarily money) to have our involvment.

We talked a bit about blogs only imagined a certain type of community, and how newspapers imagined another type. The goal in some ways is to create a national on-line media (or a media that both allows the addressing of the national as well as the imagining of the national) out of micro-publishing.

My whole imagined communties thing comes from this book by Benedict Anderson:

“Anderson proposes the following definition of nationalism: it is an imagined political community that is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because members will never know most of their fellow-members, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.It is limited because it has finite, though elastic boundaries beyond which lies other nations. It is sovereign because it came to maturity at a stage of human history when freedom was a rare and precious ideal. And it is imagined as a community because it is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”

from here

Print had a huge part to play in the creation of nationalism.

Check out a synopsys of this point:

“Anderson offers that the following bases, historically, made possible the imagining of the nation:

a. Decline of belief that there is a sacred text that irrevocably embodies truth. Changes in the religious community gave rise to the belief that nationalism was a secular solution to the question of continuity that has been answered previously, by religious faith. The decline of religious dominance also led to the demotion of the sacred languages. The growth of secular languages by the sixteenth century lowered the status of Latin as the only sacred script language. As a result, the older communities lost confidence in the sacredness of a particular language in its ability to grant them elite admission to certain spiritual truths.
b. Decline of the belief that “society was naturally organized around and under high centers-monarchs who bruled under some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation” (36). In the 17th century, the legitimacy of sacral monarchy met its gradual debility in Western Europe (21). People began to doubt the belief that society was naturally organized around these centers.
c. Development of the idea of “homogeneous, empty time,” in which “a sociological organism moving calendrically through [it] is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily through history” (26). Two events happening simultaneously, though in separate places, can link the people involved in those events by this precise “simultaneity;” that is, they share a consciousness of a shared temporal dimension in which they co-exist (see C) (25).

Origins of National Consciousness
Along with the above historical happenings that laid the path to the consciousness of nationalism, the practice of print-capitalism facilitated the imagining of the nation. The expansion of the book market contributed to the vernacularization of languages. Print languages created unified fields of communication, which enabled speakers of a diverse variety of languages to become aware of one another via print and paper. These people, consequently, became aware of the existence of the millions who share their nation and language. Print-capitalism also gave fixity to language, which stabilized it and gave print language a sense of antiquity that enhanced the feeling of nationalism. Finally, the notion of print capitalism gave dominance to a few selected languages for their printability: dialects that were closer to print languages than others were the ones that were commonly used and persistent through history (44-46). ”

(from here)

(boris - I think you’re the only person that made it all the way through this ;)

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