Dennis Stevens
Teachers College
Columbia University
New York

Instrumentalizing Debord's Spectacle

This presentation will investigate the use of online streaming video as a method of offering a critique of culture. With the advent of Web 2.0 technology, the culture industry is no longer a top-down enterprise, as originally argued within Adorno/Horkheimer critique. Presumaby, public opinion is shaped and expressed via the spectacular within media and politics and is dominated by a capitalistic ethos. Alternatively, the term culture jamming describes a wide range of public activism that is generally positioned against commercialism and the corporate image. For example, in mainstream American politics and media, television programs like Jon Stewart's The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert's The Colbert Report have demonstrated that it is possible to use parody and satire, under the guise of entertainment, to offer a critique of culture. Similarly, but with a pseudo-academic criticality, this presentation will provide examples and a context for online "shows" that are using on-camera performance in a manner which instrumentalizes Debord's notion of the spectacle to offer a critique of culture.