Newspapers created national togetherness by shifting simultaneity from historical time to shared space

Evidence

Language, through its forces of standardization and simultaneity, was a vital scaffolder of the imagined community. It was, however, not just an “emblem of nation-ness, like flags, costumes, folk dances and the rest” (Anderson 1991, 133); that is to say, language did not merely reflect nation-ness—it helped conjure it. Print capitalism, in turn, afforded a new “fixity to language,” helping it build the “image” of the nation. The idea of simultaneity, or the notion that nationhood is experienced by members of a given nation in a particularizing, homogenizing way, was “transverse, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar”; it embodied a “homogeneous, empty time” (24). The role of the newspaper, in particular, is key here as a medium that enabled such “fixity.” Anderson (1991) writes of “an American” who will never meet “more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow Americans” but nonetheless “has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.” (26) This togetherness was largely realized in the quotidian ritual of reading the morning newspaper, which imbued a national image through “the refraction of even ‘world events’ into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers” (63), performing effectively a sociospatial reordering. Consumed simultaneously by otherwise spatially isolated individuals, commoditized newspapers thus mark the momentous transition from simultaneity across time (history) to simultaneity across space—a mass ceremony substituting for that of daily prayer. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Directly maps onto the reader’s goal of tracing how speculation migrated across domains — print’s mass ceremony prefigures market screens and dating apps as new simultaneity engines. — connects to: Mass daily news created the modern public sphere and public opinion — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 42; Mass democratic association historically depended on newspapers to coordinate collective action — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 734
• STORYSTEM: The ‘mass ceremony substituting for daily prayer’ framing could seed a story about a community stitched together by a shared digital ritual other than worship — e.g. simultaneous betting or trading.