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In sixth grade, I was taken to a pediatric psychologist. I had issues. I wasn’t able to survive more than a few hours without my parents

"Twenty years later, I’m the loneliest adult I’ve ever known. I found a way to recover from those crippling bouts of Separation Anxiety Disorder so well that extreme isolation is now my default lifestyle. It’s not out of choice. Cured by cinema to the point of secondary infection, I overcompensated. Which is why I try to cover up these communal deficiencies by romanticising the concept of urban alienation, choosing to emotionally identify with the younger counterparts of those cinematic oldies.

I can’t look into a person’s eyes. Most of my relationships start with the written word, online or otherwise. I’ve chosen writing as my profession, swimming as recreation, and traveling solo as my passion, all as convenient ruses to justify my inherent awkwardness with human society. The fear of being judged is a disease that can’t be contained."

#cinema #people who sit in the dark #imaginary communities #absence of real community

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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

Gilroy states that groups often comprehend their kinship through an imaginary connection. Gilroy’s use of the term ‘imaginary’ is derived from the writing of Benedict Anderson, who raises the point that members of communities will never know all of their fellow members and still they all share an image of what bonds them. The shared image that members see in their minds eye is what is meant by ‘imagined’. Anderson goes on to say that “communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” This question of how they are imagined, can be translated into the question of how they are represented through signs and symbols to create discourses of national identity.

#gilroy #kinship #imaginary connection #benedict anderson #imaginary communities #representation #signs #symbols #semiotics #national discourse #national identity

Take this transaction for instance. I bought something for $10 from them. They gave me a mythic in game item as a bonus. When I sell that item for $25, they take approx $3.25 out of that. I then spend $13 of that on a game, of which they take a third. So that's like another $4.22. That totals $7.57 that they have made back from that already. Now, if I purchase another game with the other 10 that I have left, they take another third. This will give them over $10. WHich means I bought an item for $10, but they actually made over $20 on the sale. Fucking genius.

My friend Dave on Valve

#valve #video games #imaginary communities #of capital

Summary

"Imagined Communities" - Benedict Anderson

Community as imagined. > "In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. (...) In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined." (pp. 5-6)

Connection through media. >"(...) fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community." (p.44)

(Source)

Extract for interview with Anderson titled 'When the Virtual Becomes the Real'

Interviewer: Can the Net give rise to a true global community that in a physical sense you could never have? Can individuals, when they become increasingly part of a larger, overarching culture, plug into that and feel charged by it in the same way traditional communities charge us?

Anderson: (...) What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net--well, it's so new that we don't know what will come next--is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they're all so specialized! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it's particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. Or you have the gay/lesbian networks or the aeronautic fan club net or any one of a zillion specialized places. What is so extraordinary about this thing is that it is not a superhighway at all in that sense. It's much more like a new kind of broadcasting. Even now in the States, if you have the right gizmos you can track into three hundred channels and surf your brains out. But if you ask these kids what they actually watch... they like the idea that there are three hundred channels but they don't really use them. They want them there but they actually follow only two or three. So I think that there is a sort of fetishization of the concept of choice.

>>> The idea of Imagined Communities and Anderson's observations concerning online practices support Gee's premise that the concept 'community' (as a single, definite description for group which people 'subscribe to') is no longer sufficient to describe socio-cultural practices related to digital (social) media.

#imaginary communities #imagined communities #Benedict Anderson #Anderson #media #mediation