Spectacle
As individual entrepreneurship has become a social imperative in contemporary late-capitalism, we have entered into an era of what we could call ‘self-spectacularization’. The spectacle is not just about the proliferation of images, but about how social relationships have become mediated by them.[1] The spectacle looks at how our lives are impacted by emphasizing representation over interpersonal experience, and how this mirrors the logic of the commodity. Initially, these representations were managed, controlled and disseminated from central agencies (such as governments and/or PR firms), yet today it is we who administer the spectacle through networked communications technology like Facebook or Instagram. We – the users and content providers – are responsible for the perpetuation of this spectacle in both producing and consuming it, most often during unpaid leisure time.[2]
[1] McKenzie Wark, ‘The Spectacle of Disintegration,’ 2016. Read Online
[2] Ibid.
Author: Patricia Reed