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Still, if television arrogates to itself a powerful presence, consciousness, or "on-ness," there are those who find that television is less "on" than other media such as film or photography. But "on-ness" now would refer to questions of low versus high definition. Traditionally this question, too, has always been related to that of ontological reference, since media with high definition have always been considered to be more present or "on" than media with low definition. Given that television may be inherently less "on" than other media, its appeal to a sense of temporal and spatial immediacy could be understood as an attempt to supplement or make up for a lack. The fact that television exists for us as an appliance which we can turn "on" at will, or that it is a medium which runs twenty-four hours a day and is therefore always already "on," contributes to a metaphysics of the medium destined to compensate for the low definition.

It may surprise some that questions about "on-ness" were in fact, raised by the ancient Greeks. In Plato's The Sophist there is a discussion of the inferiority of the phantastic to the icastic. The icon is "like the original" and is called "a likeness." But the phantastic is described this way:

What are we to call the kind {of image} which only appears to be a likeness of a well-made figure because it is not seen from a satisfactory point of view, but to a spectator with eyes that could fully take in so large an object would not be even like the original it professes to resemble? Since it seems to be a likeness, but is really so, may we not call it a semblance [phantasma]? (236b)

Plato's specific example refers to sculpture. An exact sculpted replica of a body will have proportions that perfect correspond to the real body. But there are artists who make colossal figures whose proportions must be distorted in order to make the figure look real from a distance. Given this phenomenon, the icon could be viewed as more "on" than the semblance, because the semblance lacks the proper ontological correspondence and supposedly perverts the subject's natural relationship to space. The semblance is threatening because it creates an alternative space and an alternative set of ontological correspondences.