Peter Wollen notes,
“Visual display is the other side of the spectacle, the side of production rather than consumption or reception.
Guy Debord, the theorist of spectacle, noted how, in modern times, an excess of display has the effect of concealing the truth of the society that produces it, providing the viewer with an unending stream of images that might be best understood, not simply as detached from the real world of things, as Debord implied, but as working to efface any trace of the symbolic, condemning the viewer to a world in which we can see everything but understand nothing – allowing us as viewer-victims, in Debord’s phrase, only ‘a random choice of ephemera’.”
I was throwing out some semi-digested content and found the Wollen quotation above. It’s interesting in light of the ‘Person of the Year’ Time Magazine article. Thiis view of spectacle is getting turned on its head. Technology is empowering the consumer – don’t you just love that word! – to produce the images (more widely content) which is now making a serious assault on corporate mass media.
Rupert Murdoch knew a thing or two when he bought MySpace…
