Imagined Communities and Digital Nation Building on Instagram

Nation - building

Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences. Homogeneity amongst people can be built with education, teaching a common language to facilitate communication, but also by brute force such as prohibiting local cultures. Democracies and dictators have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenize the population. We study and we c...

Modernism and Nation Building

Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook

Online social networks such as Friendster, MySpace, or the Facebook have experienced exponential growth in membership in recent years. These networks offer attractive means for interaction and communication, but also raise privacy and security concerns. In this study we survey a representative sample of the members of the Facebook (a social network for colleges and high schools) at a US academi...

Nation-Building, Nationalism, and Wars∗

This paper explores how the increase in army size observed in early modern times changed the way states conducted wars. Starting in the late 18th century, states switched from mercenaries to a mass army by conscription. We model the incentives of soldiers to exert effort in war and show that as army size increases paying mercenaries is no longer optimal. In order for the population to accept fi...

Imagined Communities, Identity, and English Language Learning

This chapter introduces the notion of imagined communities as a way to better understand the relationship between second language learning and identity. It is argued that language learners’ actual and desired memberships in imagined communities affect their learning trajectories, influencing their agency, motivation, investment, and resistance in the learning of English. These influences are ex...