The term might just seem catchy, just smart packaging. Australia Home' ad. This new modest or sceptical nationalism takes the media constructedness or saturation of this space as the condition of its being, not a problem to be resisted. This is both a mundane fact that has been with us as long as modern nations, and something unprecedented in the new 'vectors' of telecommunication that have altered dizzyingly what it means to talk of a 'national community'. Wark describes these 'communication vectors' as comprising a realm of 'third nature' over and above the second nature of cultural habits.
Nations exist in culture.
The virtual republic is also about the release and proliferation of different understandings of the past. Windsor doesn't notice any of this. This is strange and interesting. Strange, because the large part of The Virtual Republic is written in pretty straightforward, even popular language, and when new terms like 'vector' or 'antipodality' are introduced they are carefully explained. Interesting, because there is a sense in which the 'messages' are banal and platitudinous.