First, I must say that I really enjoyed the few chapters we read from Imagined Communities. I appreciated Anderson's attempt to explore nationalism as a certain kind of cultural artifact, both in terms of a historical "how" and a perhaps an interdisciplinary "why" (4).
But I am struggling with one of Anderson's points vis-a-vis the development of the media. To a certain extent, I understand the importance of a sort of lingua franca print language in creating a territorially and linguistically bounded community of readers, "the embryo of the nationally imagined community" (44). But since these people are still not actually talking to each other, anyway, especially the ones living in more rural settings, why is this connection through print media so important? Why couldn't the primordial imaginary community be a connection through something else? Couldn't a French farmer feel himself a part of a community of other French farmers who do the same kind of work and live similar lives, though he will never meet them? Admittedly, thinking of himself as a "French farmer" might be a bit anachronistic, but I still don't see why language here is privileged over, say, residing within the same territorial boundaries. I feel like I'm missing something big here, but why is this community of readers so special, so different?
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You touch on a couple of the critiques of Anderson's argument here (and this has been a very heavily critiqued theory). One of these critiques is the assumption that nationalism is necessarily finds its basis in literate society, which has been demonstrated to be problematic in a couple of contexts (including Indonesia).
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