Page 164 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

Nation as a cultural resource
In most cases, the nation is a formalized, relatively stable, homogenizing social
space that citizens encounter every moment of their everyday lives, but it is also
an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) that is sufficiently polysemic to
allow personal interpretation and commitment to a cultural space that ‘we share
in common’ (Chaney 1994: 126). This represents the crucial blending of ideol-
ogy and the state with culture and community in the building and maintenance
of the nation. Nations as political states, therefore, are constructed ‘to be equiva-
lent in all important aspects to a culture: a culture that has an identity through
being distinctively different and thereby creates an identity for its members’
(Chaney 1994: 126). This fact is key to our analysis. The nation ‘works’ as a
fundamental cultural resource because it gives people a shared sense of di ffer-
ence that is endlessly reinforced, even outside conscious awareness, through the
routines and rituals of everyday life, and through symbolic displays of the values
and traditions, especially as they are expressed in a dominant language – a
language, by the way, that should be spoken without a foreign accent.
But nations are much more than historically situated, geopolitical structures
or communities of individuals who share the past and speak the same language.
Nations are also complex and distinctive cultural narratives – mythical stories
that people tell themselves that inscribe, reinscribe, and reinforce an idealized
system of values. The nation has a personality and is experienced emotionally.
Its fundamental elements – the legal system, religion(s), dominant language,
system of commerce, and social customs – are all backed up by unifying material
and symbolic forms including constitutions, flags, national anthems, school cur-
ricula, military forces, mass media, national museums, and advertising. Nations
have always depended on symbolic forms for their political and cultural viabil-
ity. The nation therefore is just as much a cultural construction as a political
one, if not more so. Nation is a discursive product that is perpetually marketed
back to its own people and to other nations. Nation thus continues to function
as a defining, unifying, reinforcing, reassuring sociopolitical and cultural
resource of extraordinary importance.
The symbolic character of nation – increasingly represented and promoted
by various media in the Communication Age – stimulates levels of emotional
involvement that contribute to the viability of any individual country as a
legitimate political state. Indeed, the mass media have long played important
roles in the process of nation-building: ‘By ritualizing and sometimes creating
great national events, such as those informal talks between President and
people, the coronation of the Queen, the inauguration of the President, the first
moonwalk, or the funeral of John F. Kennedy, government has played, and
continues to play, a vital part in establishing the new mythologies of the state in
modern times’ (Price 1995: 11).
While such media representations are clearly motivated by political interests
and indeed generally serve those interests, the rhetorical axes of nation and

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