he concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. They are sovereign since no dynastic monarchy can claim authority over them, in the modern period: They are limited in that nations have "finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations". These communities are imagined as both limited and sovereign. The media also create imagined communities, through usually targeting a mass audience or generalizing and addressing citizens as the public. Members of the community probably will never know each of the other members face to face However, they may have similar interests or identify as part of the same nation. As Anderson puts it, a nation "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". Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity: for example, the nationhood felt with other members of your nation when your "imagined community" participates in a larger event such as the Olympic Games. An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and, for practical reasons, cannot be) based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members.
Benedict Anderson defined a nation as "an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign".
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