Guardian on "Society of the Spectacle"

The Guardian has published an article titled "Guy Debord predicted our distracted society" to accompany their Big Ideas podcast discussing Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle. A few handpicked snippets:

Its title alone is now used as shorthand for the image-saturated, comprehensively mediated way of life that defines all supposedly advanced cultures: relative to what Debord meant by it, the term usually ends up sounding banal, but the frequency with which it's used still speaks volumes about the power of his insights.

But there are also very modern phenomena that fit its view of the world: when Debord writes about how "behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other", I now think of social media, and the white noise of most online life.

Like most of The Society of the Spectacle, you have to read such words slowly, but they hit the spot: he is talking about alienation, the commodification of almost every aspect of life and the profound social sea-change whereby any notion of the authentic becomes almost impossible.

The words point up something very important: that 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."