Caleb is off and ready to talk about the political and sociological implications of technology like this.
We gotta give MAD PROPS to Caleb for referencing Guy Debord and proposing that we get a conversation going about his work through the Honors blogs. Here's what Wikipedia says about Debord:
Debord's theories attempted to account for the spiritually debilitating modernisation of both the private and public spheres of everyday life by the forces of market capitalism during the post-WW2 modernisation of Europe. Feelings of alienation, Debord postulated, could be accounted for by the invasive forces of the 'spectacle' - the seductive nature of consumer capitalism. Debord's analysis applied the critique of commodification by Karl Marx, Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse to what is superficially called 'the media' and claimed that alienation was more than an emotive description, but a historically determined outcome of capitalism.
You can read Debord's The Society of Spectacle online here. You can read his equally important Notes on The Society of Spectacle here.
How about a sample from the SOS:
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.
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