Studying Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle provides more to ruminate on in 2015 than perhaps even the Frenchman could have predicted. His comments on the “society of the spectacle,” or mass media, apply to the current media environment (and environment is a very good word for it). More than ever before, the society and the media are intertwined. Debord argues that “the spectacle” so engrosses every aspect of our social lives that “Everything that was once directly lived has moved away into a representation,” (Debord, Thesis 1).
Chapter 2 involves the commodity as the driving force of the spectacle. Money, which has no intrinsic value, enslaves men to a meaningless chase of the qualitative and pits them against one another. The world is “at once present and absent” as commodity dominates “all living experience” (Debord, Thesis 37). This notion falls in with the driving Marxist tenet that capitalism enslaves men to the very thing they believe set them free. We no longer work directly for the goods that keep us alive. This second chapter of Society of the Spectacle rails against the controlling form the media takes in a capitalist society.
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Reading Debord in the context of a class on modern media, the effects of the heightened interconnectedness of the people and “the spectacle” should be considered. It is true that the media is a consuming force in our lives, and it is true, as Debord writes in Thesis 36, “...the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.” However, new technologies have so broadened the scope of media that the average consumer in a first-world country can publish as a part of it. And they do, effectively contributing to the spectacle. In the world of fashion and beauty, bloggers and Youtubers- regular folks- interact with the brands they love and sometimes work together. Entrepreneurs and creatives in every field can build their businesses around their social media. While everyone has the potential to be a media outlet, Debord’s words still hold- these images “impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.”
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The interactivity of our media now works to feed our individual material desires as well. Searching online for a new video game system? The following week your Facebook and other frequently visited sites will have targeted ads. Shopping on Amazon? They’re posturing to you with whatever random items you might have been checking out at 2 a.m. three days ago. Targeted ads and the convenience of online shopping can certainly be beneficial and fun, and the spending patterns of Americans reflect that. Consumer spending continues to grow, exponentially faster than wages, and despite the widening wage gap.
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At the same time, more and more people have the tools to contribute to the spectacle. The potential for interactions among people all over the world grows every second in this media landscape. That's something that Debord perhaps couldn't forsee. Our hypercapitalist society is rife with problems, but also with real opportunity that is being taking advantage of.
Sources
Debord, Guy-Ernest. "The Society of the Spectacle." The Situationist International Text Library. N.p., 1967. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.
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