The imagined community revisited through a mock-nationalistic youtube web series

Abstract

This paper is based on the question: can we revisit the notion of ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983) to use it as a reliable analytical tool for media studies in the digital age? The concept is widely used in social sciences and media studies, but is used more often than not with total disregard for its epistemological purport, thus jeopardizing its heuristic value. I consider a concept initially proposed as a valuable approach to study the emergence of nations in the 19th century, adapting it to analyze a popular parodic take on the 21st century nation which takes YouTube as its medium. I argue that Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ benefits from being redefined in terms of Peircean semiotics. My approach is based on Peirce’s phaneroscopic categories, and on the iconic working of the human imagination. As a case study for this revisited concept, I use a YouTube weekly series called Tiranos Temblad, which consists of an odd medley of amateur videos drawn from that social media website. The topic of all these videos is a discussion of or reflection on the small Latin American nation of Uruguay. Some of the edited videos are local but many come from abroad. The latter enthusiastically praise Uruguay but lack even the most elementary knowledge about it, as the voice-over narrative never fails to remark and celebrate in a deadpan style that makes the series curiously unny. I claim that this web series is a parodical revisiting of nationalism and of the rebranding of a nation.