More Imagined Communities

Reading today’s readings in light of Anderson’s Imagined Communities, I could not help but notice the irony in the media producer’s intention of the audiences vs. what actually happened. In the first example of the Egyptian melodrama, the producers sought to bring a more modern attitude or feeling to the viewers of the soap opera, to connect them to their principles of kinship and community in this way. Abu-Lughod argues that instead, a sense of individualism is sparked. The viewers begin to view their lives in this melodramatic sense, isolating themselves in a sense by portraying onto people in their lives the positions or identities of people in the melodramas and making themselves the main characters. In addition, however, the producers unintentionally created a stronger religious community among the viewers of the show. The subtle religious praises ignited the sense of imagined religious community among the viewers.

In the Dornfeld reading on public television, the many different opinions and production aspects that go into public television all have a different assumed audience, and thus alter the direction of any given program to please this audience. Because of the so many different opinions that go into public television specifically, every one person’s intended audience never was the actual audience. Instead the “hybrid” audience that Dornfeld describes is the actual community watching public television as opposed to each person’s imagined community.