The coming together of space travel, photography, and television in the 1960s provided human civilization with the first views onto its planet from the outside, prompting a new ‘globalist consciousness’ by which ‘an entire planet becomes graspable as one's own local backyard’ (Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, 4). This new consciousness, largely the product of images broadcast on television sets, forced the reconfiguring of how one imagined and mentally mapped one's world. Since that time, commercial visual media have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Whether we are tuning in to the nightly news to passively absorb world events, or more actively seeking answers to specific questions via the Internet, we increasingly turn to the screen as a locus of clarity upon our world. For good or for bad, commercial visual media now constitute the ‘primary means’ by which most of us relate to ‘global processes and spaces’ (Heise, 65).

Commercial visual media, however, remove the crucial physical and cognitive distances between the viewer and the world on display, all too often portraying a simplified and depthless reality packaged for rapid consumption. As such, for Verena A. Conley, commercial visual media such as television ‘elide … any gap or space between reality and meaning,’ and this has consequences for senses of place and of belonging,

since it is precisely in that gap, where we make our own meaning of the world, that ‘existential territories’ are forged (Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory, 58). Today, this elision and the resulting eviction of existential space reaches an apotheosis, as the entirety of the globe seems to be in our grasp in the form of luminous images of technologically enhanced clarity, delivered at the speed of light.