In reality, many (perhaps most) contemporary communities must be imagined (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983). Anderson (1983) suggests that all communities larger than small villages are, to some extent, sustained by notions of imagined, understood others. Even in a premodern context, distant peoples were united through the communal nature of shared religions such as Roman Catholicism. But with the rise of mass media, community is spread and reproduced very efficiently. This allows community members to possess a well‐developed sense of vast unmet fellow community members, to imagine them. So, for most social theorists, but not all, community is no longer restricted to geographic co‐presence of members. For us, the concept of community is much larger than place. It is as Bender (1978, p. 145) defined it: “a network of social relations marked by mutuality and emotional bonds.” This conceptualization is consistent with a social network analytic perspective of community (Granovetter 1973; Oliver 1988; Wellman 1979; Wellman and Wortley 1990), which stresses the functioning of primary ties over notions of local solidarity. Such an approach has also been referred to as a community‐liberated perspective, with community being liberated from geography (Wellman 1979), due largely to the presence of inexpensive and accessible communication.