When competition for attention becomes the organizing principle of an entire culture, the image no longer competes within the environment – it begins to shape the environment itself. What happens when an image no longer competes for attention, but the world itself is organized around that competition?
We now enter a world in which circulation no longer feels like choice, and attention itself becomes structured around the pace of those who excel at the propagation of images – marketers. Taken to the extreme, what began as relevance becomes saturation; what began as circulation becomes ambience.
Long before social media, philosopher Guy Debord named this condition the spectacle, but his insight is not a complaint about images themselves. At the core, Debord is diagnosing a transformation in social relations. The spectacle is not a collection of pictures but a world in which relationships are increasingly mediated by images, rankings, performances, and appearances. Social relations with other people become parasocial relationships with representations of other people.
Authority now flows through representation, not presence. We are increasingly exposed to proxies for real objects and people without actually interacting with those objects or people. The world becomes a screen, for lives to be displayed and watched, and for projected meaning to be measured and aggregated.
Take any social platform from Youtube to OnlyFans – “followers” engage with a pre-recorded or a screen-filtered version of the content creator, a version that is curated and refined for public consumption. Even on a Zoom meeting or a video call, what comes through is not the real person, but a compressed representation of that person. In the world of virtual or augmented reality, the proxy becomes even more irrefutable, where objects and people exist entirely outside of the physical realm.
This recalls Marshall McLuhan’s famous insight: the medium is the message – the technology of transmission reshapes perception. Let’s say you have been shipwrecked and are now stranded on an island. It makes all the difference whether your best medium for communication is a smoke signal or a satellite phone. With the former, even if another human were to spot your signal, it would be unclear what you are communicating; with the latter, you could clearly bemoan your plight and solicit rescue. Your medium of communication shapes the content you can communicate in your message.
Neil Postman expanded McLuhan’s idea by parlaying it to the advent of 24-hour television programming. When news, sports, and even entertainment channels are faced with filling every minute of every day with programming, the quality and density of information necessarily degrades; with the fierce competition for eyeballs, entertainment becomes the inevitable hook to keep the audience tuned in, whether the primary objective of the program is entertainment or not. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in 1985, Postman poignantly postulated that when entertainment becomes the dominant mode of public discourse, seriousness, reflection, and depth are displaced. Forty years on, there is perhaps more truth in this than we might care to admit – spectacles beget spectacles.
In characterizing images as the medium, Debord does not argue that people are deceived because images are false. He argues that people become passive because images stand in for lived experience, pre-ordaining meaning before individuals can, or even need to, act. In a society of endless images, individuals become spectators rather than participants, conditioned to receive rather than to actively engage.
Yet herein lies a paradox: humans have always participated in image systems, from lighting candles at altars to repeating pilgrimage rituals. Harking back to Belting’s triadic model of image-medium-body, the cultural technology of image-making is still very much a part of the human condition. The spectacle, then, is not the cause of passivity as much as the industrialization of passivity. At the level of image pervasiveness today, every surface competes for our attention, our gaze, our desire. Our thought patterns are deliberately shaped by infrastructures designed to manipulate our biological wiring to capture and hold attention – not to free it. Conflicted between our natural inclination to connect with meaningful images and the alienating world of proxy images, we become paralyzed.