Television’s felt immediacy stems from transmission velocity, not image quality

Evidence

The temporality of rapid relay, Heike Schaefer notes, is behind “the sense of spatial proximity, of being there … factuality, authenticity, and veracity,” and “is an effect of the velocity with which televisual images are transmitted and received rather than of the precision, clarity, or motion of the images.” Moreover, spectators “adopt the time of its flow” while also becoming subject to what Bernard Stiegler deems “a massive synchronization machine” by which “consciousnesses all over the world interiorize, adopt, and live the same temporal objects at the same moment.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 198

Categorization

• XREF: This is Kornbluh inheriting the Jameson/postmodernism frame about culture flattening mediation into immediacy — the reader’s explicit goal of judging her structural debt to Jameson. — connects to: Early television commanded trance-like, immersive attention rivaling cinema. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 438
• DEFINE: Defines ‘immediacy’ concretely as an effect of transmission velocity (flow/liveness) rather than visual fidelity — a core term she must be able to name.