The newspaper’s dateline grounds its disparate stories in shared homogeneous 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, 111

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter on homogeneous empty time and the novel-as-socioscape discussion; also resonates with Anderson’s larger point about simultaneity forming community in anonymity. — connects to: News must be simultaneously new and comparable to prior events — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 76

Related

• The newspaper’s dated format imagines the world as moving through homogeneous empty time. (similarity 0.91)
• The newspaper’s juxtaposition of unrelated events is an imagined linkage, not a natural one. (similarity 0.80)
• Newspapers created national togetherness by shifting simultaneity from historical time to shared space (similarity 0.80)
• The newspaper’s daily obsolescence makes its mass reading a simultaneous ceremony (similarity 0.78)