The following contribution interweaves culturalanthropological and media studies approaches to analyze the concept of 'community' in a phenomenon of the new media, the socalled 'milblogs.' These communities use the blogosphere to create and distribute a master arrative about the relationship of American civil society with its military and, thus, about how segments of American society attempt to come to terms with the War on Terror. The contribution emphasizes the interaction of bloggers with their audience in the narrative process of imagining, proclaiming, and nurturing such communities.

This is a book about contemporary American(ized) narratives and the audiences they call into being. It brings together eight very diverse case studies covering and investigating a wide range of media, genres, and modes to ask how contemporary 'texts' encourage 'imagined communities' of readers/viewers that operate as 'public spheres' of social and political deliberation, self-fashioning, and debate. In asking this question, the contributions collected in this volume shift perspectives in a number of ways: They question the boundary between the audiences of (often popular and broadly circulating) narratives on the one side and national public spheres on the other; they thus encourage rereading the transnational mobility of American(ized) narratives not simply as a phenomenon of popular culture but as an indicator of emerging transnational public spheres; and they invite us to look closely at the narrative dynamics with which these texts operate their audiences as public spheres.