Media Culture &

the Triumph of
the Spectacle
Douglas Kellner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yx55gg82J8

History of Media Spectacles

Classical Greece
Ancient Rome
Eastern World
Globalization through military Spectacle & Empire

With the Internet, media spectacles

have become one of the organizing
principles of the economy

Guy Debord & The Society

of the Spectacle
French theorist
Spectacle unifies and
explains a great diversity of
phenomena [Media &
Consumer society)
Tool of pacification and
depoliticization

Media Spectacle
technologically-constructed media productions that are
produced and disseminated through the so-called mass
media, ranging from radio and television to the Internet
and latest wireless gadgets.

Megaspectacle
Defined both quantatively and qualitatively
phenomena of media culture which dramatize its
controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of
conflict resolution.

i.e. the News

When the real world changes into simple

images, simple images become real beings and
effect motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The
spectacle as a tendency to make one see the
world by means of various specialized
mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly),
naturally final vision to be the privileged human
sense which the sense of touch was for other
epochs.

Spectacle
Distinction between passivity and activity and
consumption and production
Commodification of everyday life
Total occupation of social life
Frankfurt School: One dimensional society false needs

Entertainment Factor
Michael J. Wolf
Branding & Promotion
Advertising, Marketing, PR

Celebrities & Media

Spectacle

icons of media culture

Madonna
Michael Jordan
Kardashians
PR- positive image

Contemporary Politics
Clinton Era
Gulf war
Bush vs. Gore [9/11]
Taiwan

Global Media Culture:

Megacorporations
AOL: called attention to escalating synergy among
information and entertainment industries and old and
new media in the form of the networked economy and
cyber culture
BUT
Also demonstrated the instability of global capitalism
Also seen in Europe

Sports
Attracts massive audiences, while generating high
advertising rates

Films
Hype
Advertising & Trailers

Television
Consumption Spectacle

 Fashion

Contemporary Architecture

Music

Critical Approach
Guy Debord & Situationist International
3 Major Differences
1) Engages Specific Spectacles
2) Interpretive and interrogatory
3) Analyze the contradictions and reversals of the
spectacle

Spectacle is always:
Contradictory
Ambiguous
Subject to reversal and flip flops

Technocapitalism:
Describes a configuration of capitalist society in which
technical and scientific knowledge, computerization, and
automation of labor and intelligent technology plays a
role in the process of production analogous to the
function of human labor power, mechanization of the
labor process, and machines in an earlier era of
capitalism

Critical Theory of
Globalization
culture of media spectacle that involves new cultural
forms, social relations and modes of experience.
ever-expanding with new technologies
Critical social theories will face challenges in mapping
these emerging new forms of culture and society.
They will also result in forms of domination and
oppression but also democratization and social justice