Thank you Hoi for the welcome... And the appreciation.hoi.polloi wrote:Welcome, Turista/T21.
Thank you for writing cogently. Much appreciated.
Can you please tell us your personal views on Vance Packard and Guy Debord, and why you value their writings? I've never heard of them before and I am sure everyone is curious about new members' perspectives on available lit. It looks to me as though Packard is in the vein of Midwestern naturalist farmer-writer Thorstein Veblen (which Wikipedia suggests with a link) but he also worked for muckraking journals (no mark against him, I suppose) and Associated Press; Debord was a popular, artistic Marxist/socialist?
Looking at these characters, I wonder if we might consider starting a "muckraking" publication of sorts. Or perhaps we are already doing that.
I don't have a view to the extent of their complete writings (I wish I had !) which I don't know in full.
I rather focused on their major (better "most known") writings when I understood that they could help to describe the society we live in.
Vance Packard to me means "Hidden Persuaders".
In wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Pack ... Persuaders
The fact that towards the end of the 50s a then rather mainstream and not-so-known journalist exposed what was behind the advertising industry, including the usage of subliminal techniques and mentioning induced needs, is still surprising to me this day.
Although the landscape may have changed, in my opinion the basics remain the same and possibly are enforced by the expansion video communication had, becoming so pervasive.
Add the change from analog to digital and consequently the easier, increased possibility of changing (editing) the content of what is watched, obtaining therefore a change in what is perceived (and by extent how reality is lived), and you can understand why I found myself on the way to this forum
Guy debord to me is the author of " The Society of the Spectacle" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Societ ... _Spectacle) more than being a marxist or a situationist for that matter, although these aspects are obviously related.
If I may I'd quote his thesis (in quotes) as mentioned in wikipedia (link above):
<<Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."
The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.">>
According to that, anyone is more likely to be considered real for their peer society if they are part of the spectacle, therefore if they are perceived through images and those who diffuse (distribute) images.
Now think about 9/11 and all the media fakery cases so well exposed here, up to last Sunday Marche Republicaine.
As rhetorical the question may be: doesn't it look like a continuous, ubiquitous and self-referential show ?