The Media is the Mirror, Pt. 1

The Spectacle in Time and Space

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”    – Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

With the above lines, Guy Debord begins his brief, but seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle.  He proceeds to describe the sum total of the efforts of Western Civilization as a progression of images, sounds and streams of video.

When Debord penned those words in 1964, the spectacle was at a remove – something seen from a distance.

Billboards, magazines, motion pictures, television, radio – all of these media were represented outside of the observer’s personal space, over there.

In the intervening decades, the spectacle has closed the distance between the observed and the observer, to absorb the society completely. What was once at a remove now forms an integral part of the atmosphere in which human interaction occurs. The spectacle has absorbed us and we are now protagonists in it, and active participants in its construction. In the 1930’s, the average person was subjected to approximately 3000 advertisements in their lifetime. Today, we are exposed to that many by lunch time.

Presaging the rise of social networks, Debord stated that the spectacle was not a collection of images, but a social relation between people that is mediated by images. He continued to say that the spectacle was not merely “visual excess produced by mass-media technologies”, but a “worldview that has actually been materialized:.

That was fifty years ago.

Today this worldview is manufactured in real time by ourselves as we create a steady stream of user generated content flooding newly invented social networks in a non-stop, addictive dialogue that we maintain and update with unblinking regularity.  Teenagers are being diagnosed with newly created neuroses that have newly coined names like “FOMO”, for “feelings of missing out” and which has become a serious emotional condition for our spectacle based society.  We no longer observe the spectacle, we are the spectacle, and we feel a compulsion to connect to it and live in it as much as possible.  It is not uncommon today for an individual to watch a television program on one appliance, while communicating with friends on a social network with another appliance.

We carry the spectacle around in our pockets, so that we may constantly refer to it and never feel as if we are disconnected from it. Human relations now occur on screens, in the spectacle, obliterating all time and distance in a perpetual here and now. Because, of course, there is no there here, there is no then, either.

Marshall Mcluhan referred to this interrelated community as the global village, a curious expansion of the familiar which absorbs the macro-worldview into the micro-worldview, in a through-the-looking-glass inversion of space and time, bringing the far away into the sphere of the familiar and sanitizing it along the way for easy consumption.

“Now that we live in an electric environment of information coded, not just in visual, but in other sensory modes, it’s natural that we now have new perceptions that destroy the monopoly and priority of visual space, making this older space look as bizarre as a medieval coat of arms over the door of a chemistry lab.”    – Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village

Which is why for so many people today, relationships on social networks are more important than relationships in the real world, or as George Bernard Shaw put it: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”