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Book Review
Nov. 6th, 2012 12:19 amThe Society of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord
This is one of the key texts of Situationist philosophy, which grew out of both Marxism and the mid-century European artistic avant-garde and largely critiqued the way capitalism, especially mass production and consumption, shapes and distorts human experience. Oddly enough, I was inspired to finally* read The Society of the Spectacle because of my Information Architecture class, and its discussions of the web as representation, and the ways in which the tools of IA represents that representation.
This book is dense and abstract (being a philosophy tract and all), but well worth the effort. Debord's critique of media-saturated, consumption-based contemporary culture is well ahead of its time, and sometimes even quite prescient. There were passages that could have been discussing current social media, despite having been written in the 1960s. Debord provides a fascinating and often illuminating way of looking at the effects of mass production, commodities and commodification, media, and consumption on human relationships and experience.
*I had been aware of the book and its basic ideas for quite some time now, thanks to Greil Marcus' absolutely wonderful book on punk and its relationship to social and political movements, Lipstick Traces.
by Guy Debord
This is one of the key texts of Situationist philosophy, which grew out of both Marxism and the mid-century European artistic avant-garde and largely critiqued the way capitalism, especially mass production and consumption, shapes and distorts human experience. Oddly enough, I was inspired to finally* read The Society of the Spectacle because of my Information Architecture class, and its discussions of the web as representation, and the ways in which the tools of IA represents that representation.
This book is dense and abstract (being a philosophy tract and all), but well worth the effort. Debord's critique of media-saturated, consumption-based contemporary culture is well ahead of its time, and sometimes even quite prescient. There were passages that could have been discussing current social media, despite having been written in the 1960s. Debord provides a fascinating and often illuminating way of looking at the effects of mass production, commodities and commodification, media, and consumption on human relationships and experience.
*I had been aware of the book and its basic ideas for quite some time now, thanks to Greil Marcus' absolutely wonderful book on punk and its relationship to social and political movements, Lipstick Traces.
