IJ study archive

TV vs. live, and the Show as spectacle — mediation and Show-economics texture

echoes

From: Federer Both Flesh and Not

  • Early text: "TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love"; broadcast's "certain illusion of intimacy", whose replays and close-ups so privilege the viewer that "we’re not even aware of how much is lost in broadcast". [the televisability passage] [e-text]
  • IJ echo: IJ's mediation critique — the gap between lived experience and its broadcast/entertainment surrogate (the EUP line about television's spurious intimacy carried into the novel's Entertainment/InterLace culture); and, for the tennis world specifically, "the Show" (the professional tour the E.T.A. juniors point toward) rendered here as branded spectacle — the buttermilk-colored Nike sport coat, the Ralph Lauren linesmen's uniforms, TV contracts, Wimbledon's relentless self-branding.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation (texture)