本本文以活字印刷的媒介作用解釋日治中期「臺灣意識」的發生。基於安德森的想像共同體概念與麥克魯漢媒介理論，本文藉由分析1920 至1930 年代的《臺灣民報》，指出文學作者 認知到活字印刷的媒介，改以不特定的讀者大眾為訴求對象，而在報紙文學中設想出臺灣意識。這個臺灣意識始自對抗日本，後漸與中國分離而形成「三百六十萬臺灣人」的明確民族 主義邊界。本文以此論證，日治中期的臺灣意識已是具有現代建構論意含的想像共同體。

“imagined community,” together with Marshall McLuhan’s theory of “media,” the author considers that Taiwan consciousness could have been arisen with the emergence of type-print literature by analyzing texts advocating literature in the newspaper Taiwan Ming-Bao from the 1920s to the 1930s. It is argued that the abstract concept of the “Taiwan people” was first claimed because the newspaper authors were aware of the capability of typeset print and then appealed to the non-specific masses, instead of familiar friends, as their readers. At the beginning, the term “Taiwan people” to oppose the Japanese was not distinguishable from that of China. Afterwards, starting from the late 1920s, a clearer boundary between Taiwan and China was drawn in the press-sponsored literature contests. That is to say, the Taiwanese nationalism concerning the “3.6 million people of our Taiwan” took shape as an imagined community according to Anderson’s theoretical meaning. Thus, the development of typographic printing should be understood as the key mechanism to the modernist construction of Taiwan consciousness.