The newspaper’s dated format imagines the world as moving through homogeneous empty time.

Evidence

This imagined linkage derives from two obliquely related sources. The first is simply calendrical coincidence. The date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the essential connection – the steady onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time. Within that time, ‘the world’ ambles sturdily ahead. The sign for this: if Mali disappears from the pages of The New York Times after two days of famine reportage, for months on end, readers do not for a moment imagine that Mali has disappeared or that famine has wiped out all its citizens. The novelistic format of the newspaper assures them that somewhere out there the ‘character’ Mali moves along quietly, awaiting its next reappearance in the plot. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 110

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Homogeneous empty time’ (Benjamin’s term, adopted by Anderson) — the conceptual framework nations are imagined through.
• XREF: Connects to later readings on how media constructs a global ‘Muslim world’ as a character moving through time independent of any one place. — connects to: The nation is imagined as a sociological organism moving through homogeneous, empty time. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 90

Related

• The newspaper’s dateline grounds its disparate stories in shared homogeneous time (similarity 0.91)
• The nation is imagined as a sociological organism moving through homogeneous, empty time. (similarity 0.84)
• ‘Homogeneous empty time’ replaced mediaeval simultaneity as the modern mode of apprehension (similarity 0.79)