A Gigantic Population of Individuals

What Facebook possesses most of all, of course, is people—a gigantic population of individuals who choose to live under Zuckerberg’s rule. In his writings on nationalism, the political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson suggested that nations are defined not by their borders but by imagination. The nation is ultimately imaginary because its citizens “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.” Communities, therefore, are distinguished most of all “by the style in which they are imagined.”