As much I think Debord's theory on the Society of the Spectacle [1] is as prescient as ever today, this article doesn't go far enough in making that case. It ev

As much I think Debord's theory on the Society of the Spectacle [1] is as prescient as ever today, this article doesn't go far enough in making that case. It even casts Google as some great democratizing force: > Wikipedia was a fruit of this garden. So was Google search and its text-based advertising model....They effectively democratized the ability to contribute to the global corpus of knowledge. Google completely changed how people access information, true, but they also did way more to centralize the web than almost any other company, ever. That's not the best news for objective knowledge. Yet they get a pass while "social media" gets indicted with an anecdote about narcissism on Instagram? At the time of this writing, searches related to The Walking Dead are the top trending ones. You need to present some much more compelling evidence that social media is behind this shift away from "knowledge," and that Google is somehow not, for me to believe they're not just as much part of the Spectacle. All that is to say that this article takes too narrow a focus, and misses the larger point because of it. The web isn't the solution or the response to the Spectacle: it's a natural extension of it. [1] The Spectacle is the idea that in popular culture people relate to each other not directly but indirectly, through the "images" presented by culture itself, i.e. "the Spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by images."