The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

Read the full post at - The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. He was part of a cohort of media theorists — mostly French, though I’d throw Marshall McLuhan in there too — who looked at the world structure coming out of World War II and asked a genuinely interesting question: what happens when mass transportation and mass media exist at the same time? The idea is that these two technologies — moving humans around the world and letting humans see anything, anywhere — would interact and define how our societies worked. I grew up in school being told that these guys were ridiculous postmodern Marxist theorists who didn’t know what they were talking about. But my goodness…they were actually right-on. What the Book Actually Argues Debord’s central argument is that the “spectacle” goes well beyond what most of us picture when we hear that word — the Super Bowl, the Olympics, a presidential election. He argues that any representation…