Immediation

Abstract

21st-century media praxis is increasingly characterised by the emerging “cultural principle”, “condition” or “culture of immediacy”. The processes summarised under the term “immediation” suggest the closure of the spatio-temporal “gap” between the agencies and the media involved, resulting in a complex interplay of social, security, scientific and economic issues. The growing interest in immediation confirms its status as a new but as – yet – underestimated paradigm for the arts, sciences and humanities which calls for a future-focused inquiry into the cultures of immediacy. However, in academic and popular discourse, the focus is on documenting either (societal) challenges or (technical) solutions. This paper seeks to address this imbalance by responding to the urgent need for a systematic understanding of the main ways in which immediation appears: firstly, today’s worldwide closed-circuit arrangements; and secondly, live-streaming practices. It proposes an innovative combination of interdisciplinary perspectives and methods to discuss the options available to increase and enrich our understanding of immediation’s potential for boosting an immense variety of societal applications. Such future-focused research into liveness and immediacy promises, in particular, to shed light onto, firstly, the concrete impacts of creative closed-circuit arrangements on the emerging “domestication” of live streaming and, secondly, the actual measures that must be taken within emerging live streaming research to assess state-of-the-art R&D in the near future. These issues are discussed for the purpose of opening up new routes towards future solutions for a sovereign and innovative usage of cultural techniques of immediation in creative and everyday media praxis.