Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle explains that the mass consumerism that has developed through mass media is the spectacle. Commodity is known as the things we consume today. Through the use of images, advertisements, and other consumerism visuals, there is a false sense of what reality is. We as a society look at these images and hope to find ourselves in them because they portray a world outside of our world that we want to be a part of. We have a want to be a certain type of person, in a certain type of environment, with certain types of ideals. These images do not let us learn to be ourselves or create our own train of thought. They essentially provide us with an already written out plan for our lives.
There is a glorification of the reality through a hypnotic process known as mass consumerism. Take the example of celebrity-backed perfumes. You may hate the smell of it and the price may to expensive, but its Taylor Swift's perfume, and you are drawn in by your infatuation with her, so you buy the perfume, despite all of the other things that tell you not too. It's that simple to draw in a consumer, and thats by finding some sort of common interest among society, which will in turn leave no room for self-thought. When we purchase these "trendy" items, we have this self-satisfaction that makes us believe we are part of that person that promotes a product like Taylor Swift. We want to be best friends with Taylor Swift or we want to be her, and the only way you can even come close is to buy her perfume. We are drawn in by that feeling of what we want, and it inevitably backfires on us because it denies us of independently thinking on our own without any big influence.
Here is the link to our power point which gives an overview of the Society of the Spectacle
We had to break the powerpoint down to a bare bone style, google documents won't let the powerpoint template we originally use download, so because of that, this is a simple powerpoint.
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