Understanding the media culture and spectacle culture

Understanding the media culture and spectacle culture
By Imam Cahyono (al Maun Institute Jakarta)

In recent decades, spectacle culture has evolved significantly. Spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. Every form of culture and society more and more spheres of social life are permeated by the logic of spectacle. Opening years of the new millennium were rich in spectacle, making it clear that the construction of media spectacle in every realm of culture was one of the defining characteristics of contemporary culture and society.

Media spectacle is indeed a culture of celebrity which provides dominant role models and icons of fashion, look and personality. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, fashion, or politics.

Entertainment has always been a prime field of the spectacle, but in today’s infotainment society, entertainment and spectacle have entered into the domains of the economy, politics, society and everyday life in important new ways. Contemporary forms of entertainment from television to the stage are incorporating spectacle culture into their enterprises, transforming film, television, music, and other domains of culture as well as producing spectacular new forms of culture as cyberspace, multimedia and virtual reality.

Fashion is historically a central domain of the spectacle and today producers and models, as well as the actual products of the industry, constitute an enticing sector of media culture. Fashion designers are celebrities, a major spectacle of the era. In fashion today, inherently a consumer spectacle, laser-light shows, top rock and pop music performers, superstar models and endless hype publicize each new season’s offering, generating highly elaborate and spectacular clothing displays. The consumption spectacle is fundamentally interconnected with fashion, which demonstrated what is in and out, hot and cold, in the buzz world of style and vogue. The stars of the entertainment industry become fashion icons and models for imitation and emulation. In postmodern image culture, style and look become increasingly important modes of identity and presentation of the self in everyday life and spectacles of media culture show and tell people how to appear and behave.

Popular music is also colonized by the spectacle, with music-video television (MTV) becoming a major purveyor of music, bringing spectacle into the core of musical production and distribution. In a similar fashion, younger female pop music stars such as Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez also deploy the tools of the glamour industry and media spectacle to make themselves spectacular icons of fashion, beauty, style and sexuality as well as purveyors of music. Male pop singers, such Ricky Martin could double as fashion models use hi-tech stage shows, music videos and PR to sell their wares.

Television has been a promoter of consumption spectacle, selling cars, fashion, home appliances and other commodities along with consumer lifestyles and values. TV addicts of whatever genre (soap opera, sports, talk show, news, etc) regularly live in the world of the media hyperreality and media spectacle periodically appear to focus audience attention and take over everyday life. It is also the home of sports such as NBA, World Cup, political spectacles such as elections, scandals and entertainment spectacles and its own specialities such as breaking news or special events. Television is today a medium of spectacular programs such as Who wants to be millionaire?, The Bachelor, etc.

Sports have long been a domain of the spectacle, with event such as the soccer World Cup and NBA Championships attracting massive audiences while generating sky-high advertising rates. Today, sports are a major part of the consumer society whereby individuals learn the values and behavior of a competitive and success-driven society. Sports heroes such as Michael Jordan and David Becham are among the best paid and wealthiest denizens of the consumer society and thus serve as embodiment of fantasy aspirations to the good life.

Film has long been a fertile field of the spectacle, with Hollywood and Bollywood (Indian films) connoting a world of glamour, publicity, fashion and excess. Hollywood has exhibited grand movie palaces, spectacular openings with searchlights and camera-popping paparazzi, glamorous Oscars, Academy Award and stylisth, hi-tech films.

Food too is becoming a spectacle in the consumer society with presentation as important in the better restaurants as taste and substance. McDonald’s provides a mythology for the fast-food corporation that renders McDonald’s golden arches a mythological site of fun and good food.

The examples just provides that media spectacle is invading every field of experience, from the economy to culture and everyday life. The cultural industries have multiplied media spectacle in novel spaces and sites, and spectacle itself is becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society and everyday life. Media culture drives the economy, generating and flowing corporate profits while disseminating the advertising and images of high-consumption lifestyles that help to reproduce the consumer society.

Media culture also provided models for everyday life that replicate high-consumption ideals and personalities and sell consumers commodity pleasures, solutions to their problems, new technologies and novel form of identity. The interactions of technology and capital are producing fecund forms of technocapitalism and a technoculture, both of which promise that the new millennium will be full of novelties, innovation, hype and instability.

A media and consumer society organized around the production and consumption of image, commodities and staged events. Experience and everyday life are thus shaped and mediated by the spectacles of media culture and the consumer society. The spectacle is like opium, which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life.

The correlate of the spectacle is thus the spectator, the reactive viewer and consumer of a social system predicated on submission, conformity and the cultivation of marketable difference. The spectacle therefore involves a distinction between passivity and activity, consumption and production, condemning lifeless consumption of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity and imagination. The spectacular society spreads its wares mainly through the cultural mechanism of leisure and consumption, services and entertainment, ruled by dictates of advertising and a commercialized media culture. This structural shift to a society of the spectacle involves a commodification of previously non-colonized sectors of social life and the extension of bureaucratic control to the realms of leisure, desire and everyday life.

It is parallel to what Herbert Marcuse said as one-dimensional society that the spectacle is the moment when the consumption has attained the total occupation of social life. Here exploitation is raised to a psychological level, basic physical privation is augmented by enriched privation of pseudo-needs, alienation is generalized, made comfortable and alienated consumption becomes a duty supplementary to alienated production.

Spectacle culture come to dominate media culture as a whole for long periods of time, as when television, radio, the internet and other media focus on the extravaganza of the moment, excluding other events and issues from media focus. The society of the spectacle as defined by Guy Debord, in which individuals were transfixed by packaging, display and consumption of commodities and the play of media events.

We are now at the stage of the spectacle at which it dominates the mediascape, more and more domains of everyday life as computer bring a proliferating rush of information and image into the house by means of the internet, competing with television as the dominant medium of our time. The result is the spectacularization of culture, and of consciousness of media proliferate and new forms of culture colonize consciousness of everyday life.

Media reality, as Baudrillard argue, is hyperreality, a world of artificially constructed experience that is realer than real, that purifies the banality of everyday life to create an exciting world of mass mediated, technologically processed experience that is often far more involving and intense than ordinary life. When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior.

Therefore, it is crucial to understanding how media culture works and generates social meanings and ideologies. It is also requires a critical media literacy, which empower individuals and undermines the mesmerizing and manipulative aspects of media spectacle. Critics and critique are thus necessary to help demystify media culture and produce insight into contemporary society and culture. People should critically to resist cultural manipulation and to be media literate.