Moreover, electronic communities provide a sense of common experience and involvement that seems lacking in much of modern society (Komito pp). Most of society today has no problem with the idea of "imagined community," where national solidarity is a projection, on the part of individuals, rather than a practice founded on face-to-face interaction and communication (Komito pp).
Komito points out that it is rare, within any group, that social relations are without conflict, hierarchy and inequality, and no matter how strong the commitment to shared values based on family, kinship or ethnicity, there is negotiation based on conflicting individual interests and concerns (Komito pp). Although collective solidarity is often a goal, it is rarely achieved, because communities are composed not only of people who like each other, but also hate each other, and thus, both co-operate and compete with one another (Komito pp). Komito warns that "one must avoid both technological utopianism that characterizes proponents of electronic moral communities, as well as the technological determinism that is used to deny the possibility of such communities" (Komito pp).
Benedict Anderson writes:
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. 'true' communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. 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 (Anderson pp).
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