Benedict Anderson’s “Census, Map, Museum” in Digital Imagined Environemtal Communities: A Case Study of the Official Website of Sierra Club دور "التعداد، الخريطة، المتحف" كما نظر لهم بينيديكت أندرسون في الرسوم Sierra Club المجتمع الرقمية البيئية: دراسة حالة للموقع لسييرا كلاب

In the revised 2006 edition of his work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983, 2006 ed.), Benedict Anderson studies the discursive roles played by three power institutions: the census, the map, and the museum in consolidating the narratives of imagined communities. This research assesses whether contemporary digital imagined communities, as represented by the selected pages from the official website of the environmental group: Sierra Club utilize the three power institutions, and (if yes) whether they play the same roles proposed by Anderson. The study focuses on the following pages from the website: “Homepage”, “Accomplishments”, and “History and Archives”. Studied sections and cultural artifacts were all retrieved on the 30th of October 2023. A qualitative analysis of the collected artifacts against Anderson’s propositions is used as an application methodology. The research reached the conclusion that variations of all three power institutions were used by contemporary digital environmental communities, as represented by the selected pages from the official website of the Sierra Club. However, while the roles and uses allotted by Benedict Anderson to each power institution were detected to various degrees in the sections understudy, it should be noted that the discussion also revealed that some roles and uses overlap between the three power institutions, something that Benedict Anderson himself declares in his book.