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Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle

 Guy Debord's La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) (1967), is a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-driven consumer culture. He examines the “Spectacle,” the term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity.

Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during Debord’s lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you “10 things you need to know about ‘x.’” The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments while encouraging us to focus on appearances.


Debord observed that the spectacle actively alters human interactions and relationships. Images influence our lives and beliefs daily; advertising manufactures new desires and aspirations. The media interprets (and reduces) the world for us with the use of simple narratives. Photography and film collapse time and geographic distance — providing the illusion of universal connectivity. New products transform the way we live. Debord’s notions can be applied to our present-day reliance on technology. What do you do when you get lost in a foreign city? Do you ask a passer-by for directions, or consult Google Maps on your smartphone? Perhaps Siri.


Technology is incredibly useful, but it also engineers our behaviour. It reduces our lives into a daily series of commodity exchanges. If he was alive today, he would have extended his analysis of the spectacle to the Internet and social media. Debord would no doubt have been horrified by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter, which monetize our friendships, opinions, and emotions. Our internal thoughts and experiences are now commodifiable assets. 


Being is replaced by having, and having is replaced by appearing. We no longer live. We aspire. We work to get richer.


Not that Debord ever used the word, but his ideas were essentially pointing to the basis of what we now know as neoliberalism. The spectacle is much more than something at which we passively gaze, and it increasingly defines our perception of life itself, and the way we relate to others. As the book puts it: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images."


For Neil Gabler, in an era of media spectacle, life itself is becoming like a movie and we create our own lives as a genre like a film, or television, in which we become "at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show" (1998: 4). In Gabler’s view, we star in our own "lifies," making our lives into entertainment acted out for audiences of our peers, following the scripts of media culture, adopting its role models and fashion types, its style and look. Seeing our lives in cinematic terms, entertainment becomes for Gabler "arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time--a force so overwhelming that it has metastasized into life" to such an extent that it is impossible to distinguish between the two (1998: 9). As Gabler sees it, Ralph Lauren is our fashion expert; Martha Stewart designs our sets; Jane Fonda models the shaping of our bodies, and Oprah Winfrey advises us on our personal problems.


We are emerging into a new culture of media spectacle that constitutes a novel configuration of economy, society, politics, and everyday life. It involves new cultural forms, social relations, and modes of experience. It is producing a new spectacle culture with its proliferating media spectacle, mega-spectacles, and interactive spectacles. It is evident in the U.S. in the new millennium and may well constitute new forms of global culture. The critical social theory thus faces new challenges in theoretical mapping and analyzing these new forms of culture and society and the ways that they may contain new forms of domination and oppression as well as the potential for democratization and social justice.


-Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle by Douglas Kellner

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