The nation-state and the new media: theoretical approaches

The Internet is often considered as a global and supranational network. In criticism of this view the author considers two concepts of media arguing that ritual consumption of the media has been steadily declining. The national discourse comes to replace it regular even for the new media which are becoming more similar to the traditional ones including their function of public ties or nation's construction site. Internet communication as well as TV channels is localized - adapted to local cultural, linguistic conditions. It begins to work for national identity as traditional media previously did. The dispute about the role of media in national identity (especially in the Internet era) forces us to re-evaluate the existing concepts regarding media and nations. Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities places capitalist print media at the very heart of his theory claiming that it was the print media which allowed for the development of new national cultures and created specific formations which eventually became new nations. Billig suggests that people do not remember their nationalism. Instead, nationalism is routinely "flagged" in the media through symbols like flags and language involving phrases like "national interest". Billig argues that it is very important to recognize these symbols if we are to understand the continuing importance of nationalism in the post-Cold War world. The processes of globalization that no one denies vie with regionalization processes that are not so visible and often hidden like banal nationalism. The Internet which emerged as a self-expanding network devoid of hierarchical structures eventually became regulated by public authorities. Now it acquires more and more features of traditional media by embedding into the national media system. The contribution of the new media in maintaining national identity depends little on the ritual consumption of content that should be taken into account in the study of media discourse. It is necessary to examine the difference in the discourses of high and low penetration of the Internet focusing on the mechanisms of identity formation on the Internet. The main theoretical approach to studying the relationship of nation-states and the media becomes modernism or constructivism in the concepts by Benedict Anderson or Michael Billig who became the most cited authors in research on nationalism.

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