A blog dedicated to art and design.

To summarize the article, a spectacle creates new forms of exploitation serving only the persistence and interests of power because power does not care how it rules only that it does. The spectacle rules by ideas and by creating spectators who are not simply passive viewers but are active patricians who are overwhelmed and dominated by false ideas created to perpetuate the spectacle. The spectators have created a world of their own false notions of reality enforced and perpetuated by the institutions who seek to reinforce the exploitation of the spectator. Thought their activities ideology is materialized. Today, it continues to circulate through the Internet and other academic and subcultural sites today. It describes a media and consumer society, organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events.

As far a personal experience involving a spectacle, I’m not sure if I have experienced it or not because I’m still a little confused on what exactly it is. Based off the way I understand a spectacle, I immediately think of infomercials. It happens to me every time, I will be flipping through the channels trying to find something to watch when I can’t sleep and as soon as I pass an infomercial, I’m instantly intrigued. Even though all they are really doing is telling you the same information over and over again and showing the same demonstrations over and over again, I can’t stop watching. And even though I know many of the products don’t even do what they say, I still want to buy one for myself. It’s incredible and frightening at the same time to think that a person, thousands of miles away on a television screen, has the power and the ability to convince us that product belongs to us. It’s an eerie feeling to think about how easily we can be manipulated and be completely unaware that its happening. What is the world coming to these days?