Instantaneous publication is a recent expectation, not a technical constraint.

Evidence

The Chinese government, for instance, employs hundreds of thousands of people to scour social media for political criticism and blocks many websites and keyword searches automatically. I am not suggesting that China’s approach is in any way ideal, or that social media contributions should queue up for publication. I am only noting that what counts as impossible only appears so to U.S. users. Users in the West are also unwilling to accept the delay between posting content and having it appear that this uniform review would require. But these constraints are in fact movable: our expectation of instant publication is no older than the contemporary web; print, radio, even the early Internet made no such promise. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 349

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth exploring historically: how did instant-posting norms get naturalized, and which pre-internet media (wire services? early bbs?) actually came closest?
• XREF: connects to: Media acceleration is a convention of time-equals-money, not necessity — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 420; News must be simultaneously new and comparable to prior events — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 76

Broader Connections

• Media acceleration is a convention of time-equals-money, not necessity #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 420
• News must be simultaneously new and comparable to prior events #expands (0.75) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 76