Connected digital speculation remains nationally bound despite global reach

Evidence

Imagined and speculative communities each have their own “narrative readerships,” their own collective ways of using the capitalist vernaculars of their time to create meaning, from the seventeenth century’s collective reciting of Bible passages and the reading of Balzac’s and Dickens’s narrative novels, all the way to our current impulsive scrolling of Instagram Stories and Facebook posts. … The explosion of new media and the commodification of complex digital technologies have continued to help expand the narrative readership of speculative communities in a much similar way. “Connectivity” may have grown exponentially, yet it rarely exceeds national borders for the majority of spectator-speculators, who remain bound to the local or national level through a myriad of area-specific technologies such as location-aware Google searches, virtual short-term rental networks, geosocial networking services, and location-based dating apps. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 100

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘narrative readerships’ as the collective way communities use capitalist vernaculars to make meaning, extending Anderson’s print-capitalism framework.
• XREF: Directly extends Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ and print capitalism; also evokes the reader’s own essay on speculation’s migration from trading floors into daily life.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what ‘capitalist vernaculars’ of the seventeenth-to-nineteenth century functioned like today’s dating and news feeds?