Immediacy is caused by capital circulation pressures, not by media’s inner nature.

Evidence

What is more, many contemporary media theorists oddly essentialize the waning of medium into the very vocation or desire of media itself across its history: from Plato’s cave to virtual reality effects, an ever more technologically enhanced, perennial pursuit of increased immediacy. Marxist historiography of production crises and the intensification of circulation suggests something else: immediacy is not an inner disposition of media, attaining ever-greater actualization in the digital era, but an outer configuration of the circulation system that digital media effectuate, with the mode of production as its cause. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 75

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the book’s central thesis directly: immediacy is a structural effect of the mode of production, not an intrinsic telos of media itself.
• XREF: Directly contradicts the technological-determinist periodization the reader will want to fight — connects to her Home Boy / digital-native-era reading and to Jameson’s insistence on mode of production as cause.