Spectacle in Web 2.0: Contemporary Social Media and Guy Debord’s Concept of the Society of the Spectacle

This article applies Guy Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle to explain the nature and popularity of contemporary mainstream social media network. Characteristics of the spectacle such as fragmentation, creation of a separate “pseudo-world,” substitution of lived experience with its representations, and all-pervasiveness are embodied and amplified in modern social networks. For instance, individual posts and status updates are the “fragments” that create a “pseudo-world” manifested in social media interfaces. The pervasiveness and sense of indispensability of the spectacle in modern society correlates with the conditions of the inability to opt out of social media, despite recognizing their negative impacts, under the culture of connectivity (the concept proposed by José van Dijck). Users spend an average of over 2 hours per day on social media, showing its centrality as a “spectacular” leisure activity today. At the same time, Debord’s concept considers the viewer as passive, and representations as something the viewer has no influence over, which is undermined by the very functioning of social media which allows user participation. Still, the concept of the spectacle remains relevant and applicable to modern social networks, particularly because viewing information is a separate process along with creating information on social media. Besides, the emphasis on the “brightness” of content is essential in the concept of the spectacle. Brightness denotes the formal and content characteristics that make some content popular due to platform affordances. Considering this, to explain the culture operating in contemporary social networks, this article proposes the concept of “brightness culture,” as it is the brightness of content and information structure that is prioritized under the “attention economy” according to which modern social media functions. Practices, values and conventions related to brightness become dominant in the social media space.