Society of the Spectacle

In today’s society, almost everything has become a spectacle. We are no longer living for the needs for a basic life, but rather on the desire for an extravagant or flashy life. Guy Debord discusses this in his book The Society of the Spectacle in stating, “However, where commodity production met the social conditions of large scale commerce and of the accumulation of capitals, it seized total domination over the economy. The entire economy then became what the commodity had shown itself to be in the course of this conquest: a process of quantitative development.” We as humans, have fully devoted ourselves to this capitalist society. If you truly think about it, we have also become the spectacles as well,  people look at each other with envy if they don’t look a certain way or they aren’t wearing the same brands as them. For example, the look the Kylie Jenner has is something that people are now going to plastic surgeons to have. Why? Because she's young and successful and has set a standard of beauty, and people want that so they go out and attempt to emulate that. The spectacle is also thrift shopping is being sold to a group of people as a "hipster" thing to do, and there are lines of people going buy used clothes because it's a trend that we have accepted and boughten into. While forgetting that other will go into thrift stores out of necessity because they cannot afford clothes from popular stores, because our minds have become so diluted with capitalism and commercialism we don't think about that.  The ideology of commercialism and a capitalism being the norm is the spectacle becoming the norm is what the Debord is trying to explain. That we will allow this to happen and take over our lives and if you look around it has.

Our industries are thriving by portraying the top one percent and how we should emulate them and become like them. We aren’t being productive members of society by challenging the norms, we are conforming to society and accepting things as is. A seven-hundred-dollar phone is far from what we need, but it is being sold to us as something we need. Basic function objects are are now deemed to no longer acceptable but is strange and odd to society. A great example comes from Henry Jenkins book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide he states, “I didn’t want the electronic equivalent of a Swiss army knife… I was told company after mobile company that they don’t make single function phones anymore. Nobody wants them.” This is a prime example of how we have feed the spectacle. We no longer find basic functional necessities of use, but rather we chase after what is deemed as the “Swiss army knife”. Being apart of the spectacle, also means that everything is to be replaced every few months or years. Nothing is built to be durable or long lasting. Thus, creating a greater market for companies to sell you products to make the product you've spent hundreds on slightly more durable, and due to all these markets the spectacle is replenished and continues on. 

In conclusion, what Debord is getting at when he’s talking about the spectacle is society’s desire for more and new. To feed into the capitalism and commercialism and have let others decide on what we need. What we need is a basic one function phone like Jenkins wanted, but we are told commercial after commercial that we need the latest Samsung of iPhone that make you life easier and make all your problems go away. The end result is that consumer is given what they want, but it doesn’t last and it’s filled will detrimental flaws. In order to fix those flaws the consumer must buy the latest product that will have other flaws and so the cycle of spectacle will go on . 

Work Cited:

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Chapter 2: The Commodity as Spectacle.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. 5. Print.

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