The newspaper’s daily obsolescence makes its mass reading a simultaneous ceremony

Evidence

In this perspective, the newspaper is merely an ‘extreme form’ of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity. Might we say: one-day best-sellers? The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing – curious that one of the earlier mass-produced commodities should so prefigure the inbuilt obsolescence of modern durables – nonetheless, for just this reason, creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaper-as-fiction. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 113

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the media-as-ceremony thread from the Homogeneous Empty Time chapter; also dovetails with Carey’s ritual view of communication.

Related

• Newspapers created national togetherness by shifting simultaneity from historical time to shared space (similarity 0.79)
• The newspaper’s dateline grounds its disparate stories in shared homogeneous time (similarity 0.78)