Society of the Spectacle

The society of the spectacle is a society in which it is heavily influenced and manipulated into thinking a certain way. Guy Debord describes the spectacle in numerous ways, such as: "the flip side of money," "the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life," a "permanent opium war," and so on.
One quote from Debord that really stuck out to me was, "36, The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by “imperceptible as well as perceptible things” — attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a selection of images which is projected above it, yet which at the same time succeeds in making itself regarded as the perceptible par excellence."

Customers line up for shoes in front of Foot Locker.

How I take this quote at least, is how people can almost "fetishize" a commodity such as shoes. For example, people will line up outside of store fronts for days and nights, and even in the blistering cold for just a pair of shoes. Stores would have to raffle out to customers in order for some to get their own pair. How I see the spectacle in this is that certain shoes and brands became so widely known all around the web, and on the streets, to the point where people feel like they have to have them. Whether they collect them, or just want to show off their purchase. Some shoes may be overpriced, but people still buy them because they are told and influenced to buy and stick with the brand.

Another quote that stuck out to me was 51, "The economy’s triumph as an independent power at the same time spells its own doom, because the forces it has unleashed have eliminated the economic necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that necessity with a necessity for boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs (now scarcely met) with an incessant fabrication of pseudo-needs, all of which ultimately come down to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy..."
Now what I am getting from Debord here, is that, as a society, we are replacing our basic necessities, with other things that we don't necessarily need,  but the desire for the commodity is so great, that we feel that it is very necessary to have.

Memes

That was a mouthful, but essentially, people like me, were brought up in a society where we are constantly being told by advertisements, social media, or the public, that certain products are "must haves" when in reality that's not entirely true.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.