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March 16, 2005
I'm reading Catherine Lumby's 'Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World.' The first chapter begins thus:
"In his groundbreaking study of journalism and popular culture, 'Popular Reality,' John Hartley sketches something he calls the postmodern public sphere, in which he finds a reversal of many hierarchies that our intellectual and political traditions have held dear. In the postmodern world, he argues, the image has triumphed over the word and the vox pop has triumphed over the opinion of experts. The public sphere is an image-saturated space which is both 'intensely personal(inside people's homes and heads)' and 'extensively abstract(pervading the planet).'"
I reckon that is dead right. We do live in a culture saturated with a rapidly changing montage of images and ideas that sidelines sustained argiument, logical reasoning and respect for expertise.
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Isn't this what Debord talks about in the Society of the Spectacle?
"The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living."
and
"The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images"