Society of the Spectacle is what we are living in today. Matt Kavanagh, McGill University student in 2005 claimed with our era of, "blogs, 24-hour news channels, and the instant celebrity of reality television" our society falls under Guy Debords idea. Debords term, "Society of the Spectacle" can be related to a capital society, but for the purpose of my discussion I want to look at his relation of this society to the media.
"In the society of the spectacle, the medium of communication is the image, literacy is increasingly image rather than print oriented". This is very evident in society since people are constantly on the go with their busy lives they rarely have time to sit through a whole article. People glance at pictures to get their stories, and most articles do have very descriptive pictures that can efficiently deliver a message. Even just reading the caption at times is enough to deliver a story. Also images are found all over our social networking sites which even further demonstrate our gravitation to telling stories with images, since many of us upload pictures to reveal the events in our lives to the world.
Pictures when explanatory or simply for the pleasure of sharing special moments are enjoyable and a unique way of sharing our lives. However in Society of the Spectacle Debor explains that these images are, "with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society."
When news is produced with intentional false information and images this contributes to the spectacle. Even in reality shows when we believe all is real, this again is a lie and contributes to the false information we receive from the media. Advertisements can be considered part of this illegitimate picture trend since representations are not achievable in reality.
Debor explains the process of Society of the Spectacle as, “the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior”. Because of this images people are motivated to behave in an unacceptable manor. On a reality TV show a night of partying is shown over the top and usually involves some violence and over the top drinking. This is obnoxious behavior also demonstrated by images of celebrities will motivate average citizens to act in such an unruly fashion.
These types of images displayed in the media are highly influential and deception of the truth will have consequences to society. The citizen journalist has a lot of access to contribute to the Society of the Spectacle since they do not have to be edited or follow a code of ethics. They could be contributing to decline in thuthiness and illusion of objectivity. However, not to put the blame only on the citizen journalists because main stream news media I'm sure could be responsible to contributing to deception.
I believe that this term is something , even though created in 1967, has much meaning for today. Because of the rise of social networking and blogging we are exposed to many images. And we use images as a way of communication because they are appealing and easy to expose people to. Because of this I believe that proper surveillance of images needs to occur since we create social relationships and ties to images we see in our society.
Article Information:
Concept: Society of the Spectacle
Author: Matt Kavanagh , McGill University
Date Entered: 2005-05-09
link : http://www.globalautonomy.ca/global1/servlet/Glossarypdf?id=CO.0034
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