The Society of the Spectacle- Jillian Kasimow

In “The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes about how the lives people live are representations of life, not actual life itself. The media produces images of certain lifestyles and after constantly being bombarded with these notions of what life should be, people actually begin to accept these falsehoods as real life. Debord writes “truth is a moment of falsehood” (9). People are so conditioned into believing that the spectacle is reality that the truth eventually becomes fake because it has become so foreign. Reality births the spectacle, thus making it an integral part of the dream state that results. However the spectacle is not reality because the images that form it are not reflections of the lives that people actually live. People come to embrace the spectacle after a while because there isn’t a way they can extricate themselves from it. The media has become an unquestionable presence in people’s daily lives, constantly there to reinforce the spectacle on a continuous basis.

Debord wrote this in 1967, but it particularly can be applied to today’s society. The line between what’s real and what’s not is no longer definable thanks in one part to the accessibility and ease of Internet sites. Blogs and social networks have given people a means to represent themselves in whatever way they please. On Facebook, people are allowed to carefully edit their profiles so that the public only sees what they want them to see. As a result, outsiders come to believe that the way people represent themselves online is truthful and entirely reflective of how their real lives are. They rarely take into consideration that people decontextualize information and pictures so that the end product always paints them in a positive light. Blogs act in the same way. The events and pictures that people put into the public realm are never guaranteed to be true but readers automatically assume they are. People live vicariously through these online outlets; they are able to live in a spectacle of altered reality. Reality has been made into a numbed dream, and that’s the way people have come to prefer it.