24 May 2021

Boorstin—Immediacy as a Form-Content Issue

Daniel Boorstin
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

Readers and viewers would soon prefer the vividness of the account...to the spontaneity of what was recounted. (14)
[My notes say:]

A classic mapping of the Form-Content problem onto the Seriousness-Accessibility problem; which is to say that both Form and Content so construed do not mediate accessibility with equal force or aplomb; rather, Form is the gatekeeper, with all of the stigma (I would say of course) of that word as we use it to apply to middlemen in the social world of the arts. Of course the market/commodification is the real driving force toward an imbalance; but the dynamic is there in any case, market or not.

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