- Youtuber Azorek79 has a video in 2 parts based on The Society of the Spectacle, narrated with excerpts from Debord's book as well as selections from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage and John Berger's Ways of Seeing.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHtSPub3w8&w=420&h=315]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN26E410Euk&w=420&h=315]
- Also, I just stumbled across a subreddit organized for a book-club-style reading of Society of the Spectacle. They began reading on Dec. 19 and are just over halfway done (they are ending by reading Comments on the Society of the Spectacle and The Revolution of Everyday Life). Check it out here.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sMo4cTZTgQ&w=560&h=315]
"Those levels of interactivity, for me, recapitulated the levels of participation that we as a society have had since the invention of media," Rushkoff said, referring to similar shifts that occurred when humans first transitioned from written language to the age of movable type.
Our conversation started with Rushkoff’s concept of “present-shock” and moved into a larger discussion of the relationship between market thinking, quantification, and what is ultimately measurable and knowable.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AXIAM7dTTg&w=560&h=315]
- "Drop the mic": an article about how the microphone changed Catholic mass.
In 1974, Marshall McLuhan argued that the microphone was the proximate cause both of the elimination of Latin from the Mass and of the turning around of the priest to face the congregation. Before microphones, a priest quietly said Mass in Latin, with his back to the congregation. From any distance, his voice was indistinct, although an instructed Catholic could follow what he was saying from a missal containing the Latin text of the Mass or a translation of it.
- "The humanism of Media Ecology": this address was delivered by Neil Postman at the 2000 MEA convention, but I just came across it and wanted to share it here.
I think there is considerable merit in McLuhan’s point of view about avoiding questions of good and bad when thinking about media. But that view has never been mine. To be quite honest about it, I don’t see any point in studying media unless one does so within a moral or ethical context. I am not alone in believing this. Some of the most important media scholars—Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, for example—could scarcely write a word about technology without conveying a sense of either its humanistic or anti-humanistic consequences.
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."
"Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate." - Neuromancer