Social media’s 2006-2007 arrival furnished the material infrastructure for immediatism’s culture

Evidence

Immediatism issues from developments in hardware and software that alter the landscape of representation. The suite of i-tech—including the smart phone and social media—began broadly in 2006–7, with the iPhone launch in June 2007 and the opening of Facebook beyond Harvard University’s walls in September 2006. In 2010, Instagram kicked off, gaining 10 million users within its first year and selling to Facebook in 2012. Twitter started in 2006, adding photo sharing in 2011, growing to 330 million users at its peak. These technologies facilitate the circulation of images for and by the masses, since everyone has a camera in their pocket and a ready-made platform to accommodate uploads and distributions, and the image-hosting functionality of the technology melds with the image-generating vocation of the users. Over one-third of the earth’s population uses Facebook; the platform teaches these individuals to think of themselves as image managers and avatars, performing exhaustive unwaged digital labor as brand-identity consultants and data producers. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 70

Categorization

• XREF: Dates/platform growth are verifiable data points reader can verify; the causal claim that i-tech infrastructure precedes and enables immediatism aligns with her Jameson-style economic-base reading.