Guy Debord used "images" as a metaphor but with Instagram it's not even a metaphor anymore.
> The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
> The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role.
Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered .... They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption.
> Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle [...] naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. It is the opposite of dialogue.
Instagram is particularly weird to me, look at what's trending, semi naked teenagers/stars, selfies and ads, that's all, for miles of scrolling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Instagra...
Guy Debord used "images" as a metaphor but with Instagram it's not even a metaphor anymore.
> The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
> The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered .... They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption.
> Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle [...] naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. It is the opposite of dialogue.