Don't believe the hype machine, don't believe the hype machine, we provide survival loss for adults. Don't believe the hype machine, they're for the journey. Don't help you hold on any further knowledge or don't believe the don't believe the don't believe the don't believe the side. Hey everyone, welcome to Barncat Media. This is a show where I talk about books, films, and events of the past and present through the lens of cultural and media theory. Today's episode is the first of a two-parter in which I'm going to be talking about nationalism and how media has and continues to play a role and how our national identity and national consciousness is formed. So in this first episode I'm going to be giving more of a historical discussion on how print media help to give rise to the concept of the nation by challenging the cultural systems that existed before it. In the companion episode still to come I'm going to be talking more about how media has changed our understanding of time in a way that has allowed us to begin thinking like a nation and I'm also going to be talking about more contemporary forms of media like television, internet, and how those have continued to play a role in how our national identity is forged. There's a book by Benedict Anderson called Imagine's Communities, Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, and he begins the book by defining the nation and he explains the nation as an imagined political community. So he explains it to be imagined because we will never meet all of our fellow countrymen and we will never all be in the same place at once and yet we are confident of their existence within the nation. And so concepts like the nation and nationalism are very abstract things and yet they are made into something that's extremely vivid and palpable by media. And so to understand how human beings began to organize themselves around the concept of the nation we need to first understand what paradigms existed prior to the nation and to do that we turn to Anderson's book. So Anderson describes two cultural systems that characterize the medieval times and these are the religious community and the dynastic realm. So beginning with the religious community in this he is referring to the spread of major religions and the influence that they had over vast territories of land. And what these religious communities all held in common was that they all conceived of themselves as cosmically central through the medium of a sacred language linked to a super terrestrial power. And so Anderson calls attention to the spoken language or the sacred language as he says and the role that it played in shaping this community's identity. And these sacred languages such as Hebrew, Greek, Latin were believed by their practitioners to have possessed an ontological truth through which only through these languages could you express truth or know God. And so it was these sacred languages and their exclusive linkage with their religion that served as a major force for identity within the religious community. And remember this is the medieval time so it's pre-15th century before the printing press had been invented and so religious texts had not yet been made widely available and accessible to the public. And so possession of and interpretation of the religious texts was an exclusive right reserved to a select few within that religious community. Now as history entered into the enlightenment which among other things ushered in new forms of communications like the printing press, the influence of the religious community and the sacred languages began to wane. With the advent of the printing press around 1493 they began and upsurge in these regional vernacular like French, English, and German while the importance of the sacred languages and the power structures they had put in place began to diminish. And just to give a snapshot of this around the year 1500 about 77% of the books that were being printed were being printed in Latin. In 1575 a majority of these books were now being printed in French. And the catalyst of this challenge to the religious community was the Protestant Reformation beginning in 1517 when Martin Luther with the help of a printing press condemned the Catholic Church. His publications would soon account for almost one third of everything that was being printed in Germany at the time. And in describing how the Protestant Reformation alongside the printing press made room for a new cultural system to emerge alongside the religious community. Benedict Anderson says, the coalition between Protestantism and print capitalism quickly created large new reading publics who typically knew little or no Latin and simultaneously mobilized them for political religious purposes. And so as the Protestant Reformation began challenging both the unquestioning authority of the Catholic Church as well as the centrality of the sacred language. People all around Europe and really all around the world began thinking about themselves differently as a group and began aligning themselves around new ideas different from what the religious communities had been dictating. Now the second cultural system that had been challenged by the Revolution of Print is what Anderson calls the Dynastic Realms. And this refers to the political system of monarchies in which it was believed that a king or queen had a divine right to rule. And for reasons similar to the decline for the religious communities, the power and influence of Dynastic Realms begins to decline around the 17th century. So in 1649, King Charles of England is beheaded, which temporarily disbands the English monarchy. In 1776, the American colonies declared independence from the British Empire and then about a decade later, the French Revolution begins which overthrows the French monarchy. And so print media along with other aspects of the enlightenment helps to fuel these populist movements that overthrow the Dynastic Realms that had been in place for so long. And it does this by not only providing a medium through which dissent can now be expressed through, but it also provides a way for these thoughts to be mass disseminated, so as to create a large scale conversation through which common grievances and common aspirations can be discussed. And as Benedict Anderson says, to mobilize a large group of people for common purposes. So those were the two major cultural systems that were major forces in how people identify themselves as groups. And we can see as print media facilitated their gradual erosion, it made room for a new cultural system to emerge through which people can begin identifying themselves by. And Benedict Anderson argues that this new cultural system that emerged in place of the old was the idea of the nation. So as the printed word and the industries it birthed began to plurferate more and more, it had somewhat homogenizing effects and all of the vernaculars that were being spoken within a region. Nothing served to assemble the different peoples and vernaculars more than print capitalism, which within the limits imposed by grammars and syntaxes created mechanically reproduced print languages capable of dissemination through the market. And then Anderson goes on to describe three distinct ways in which print languages laid the basis for a national consciousness. So first off, print language created a unified field of communication and exchange. And so if you imagine a region inhabited by people who speak different varieties of French, for example, these people might have challenges communicating verbally. But because of the standardizing nature of print, the same people might be able to arrive at a more common ground of everybody speaking or at least reading or hearing about this same kind of French that's appearing in print form. And so in the process, this printed form of the language creates its own language field by which people begin identifying with rather than their native vernacular. And that leads me to the second way in which prints helped laid the basis for a national consciousness. And that was in the way that it gave those languages that appeared in print form preference over those that weren't. So the vernaculars that were appearing in print began to be more commonly used, commonly referred to. And as a result, those languages that didn't have a print expression slowly began to be phased out. And this of course had the effect of homogenizing languages until there is a very few perhaps one central vernacular that was being used within a region. And lastly, print media laid the basis for a national consciousness. By the way, it gave a new fixity to language. And Anderson uses the example of books and how the ability to mass produce a book and to distribute it almost anywhere in the country gave a new sense of antiquity to the nation. So for example, when we learn about American history, we might read something like Thomas Payne's Common Sense or the Federalist Papers. Even though these were written hundreds of years ago, they're still widely available and easily accessible. And this is something that wasn't possible in societies prior to the advent of the printing press. And so print allows a nation to preserve and access its culture and history in ways that weren't possible before the printing press. And I'm going to leave it at that for now. In the next episode, I'm going to talk about what Benedict Anderson has to say about how books and newspapers affected our sense of time in a way that allowed us to begin thinking as a nation. And then I'm going to continue on that thought by talking about more contemporary forms of media like television and internet and how those continue to be a force for foraging our national identity. All episodes of Barncat Media can be seen on YouTube and I will see you next time.