Imagined communities, cricket and social media

How is social media changing the (understanding of) ‘imagined communities’? Anderson’s seminal work proposed the idea of a nation to reside within an individual’s mind as an imagined community – fellow national members out there whom one did not know yet were sure of their existence on a shared set of values and a collective performance of rituals. Take reading the same newspaper every morning, believing that all the other national members did the same, reading the news in order and imagining the nation to be organised around such practices without ever knowing the other readers. These actions, Anderson argued, brought a nation and its people alive in each person’s mind, making the nation an imagined political community. Sports events, for instance, are when nationhood is experienced (or tangibly seen) when the imagined community collectively participates in it. But an experience of which nationhood? This is often assumed to be constructed by the elite discourse, emerging from political and cultural privilege. Hobsbawm (1991) notes that while nationalism "is constructed essentially from above…it cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is, in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interest of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist". Drawing upon the work of Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008), this paper's theoretical underpinnings put forth the nation as a discursive construct. Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008) suggest that this nation is legitimated and constituted "not (only) in response to elite discourse but also according to the contingencies of everyday life". This paper furthers this argument by providing evidence and exploring the many ways in which nationalism is rooted in the mundane ways of life routines, even at the peak of nationalistic fervour: in international cricket matches. The paper analyses the Twitter discourse around India's most discussed / popular matches against other national teams during the International Cricket Cup 2019. The data shows how discourse around national competitiveness or vehemently flagging the nation in discourse remains at par with discussion around players, personalities and ‘what a shot!’ moments, and their linguistic expressions rooted in sarcasm and ‘silly’ jokes. The discourse concerned the sport itself more than anything else, if at all the nation. The paper, therefore, suggests two points: firstly, the evidence supports and encourages the discipline to view nationalism from the bottom and locate its expression within the people. Secondly, the expression of the nation is not a given and is context dependent. Mere international competitiveness is insufficient grounds for invoking the nation or the imagined community to assemble. While communities are likely imagined, their imagining at a particular moment remains context dependent.