Page 132 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 117
according to a number of critical theorists both then and now,
the combined effects of mediation and commodification serve to
produce a realm of culture in which meaning and representa-
tions become autonomous and self-generating – increasingly
divorced from any prior reality.
3 Its relation to any underlying concept of reality is unclear. For example,
media reports are frequently based on human interest stories
related more to the motivations and the psychological contexts
surrounding the actors involved in various pseudo-events, rather
than any actual substantive significance to the events themselves.
Thus, an exclusive television interview on the breakdown of
Princess Diana’s marriage and her subsequent mental state
constitutes a self-evidently important ‘news’ item – without any
attempt to assess the importance of such issues in a wider, more
genuinely political sense.
4 It is an essentially tautological phenomenon. Related closely to the
previous point – the fact that an event is presented as being
important creates its own importance. Ultimately all media rep-
resentations tend to valorize the representative power of the
media largely irrespective of the actual content (once again
McLuhan’s the medium is the message).

Thus Boorstin argues that reality has been replaced by a largely
separate world that is capable of reproducing itself. He offers a
number of direct explanations for the proliferation of pseudo-events:
+ They are more dramatic.
+ Once disseminated they create the conditions for other ‘events’.
+ Subsequent events in their turn are amenable to the networks
and technologies through which they are relayed and so tend to
supplant alternative non-pseudo-events.
+ Within an environment that privileges the pseudo-event knowledge
of pseudo-events assumes its own importance.
+ Because they are artificially generated and created to be dissemi-
nated they are inherently repeatable, and so can be manipulated
and processed to occur to fit in with schedules and audience
demand.
+ Given their relationship to the systems that re-present them,
pseudo-events both generate and require money to create in the
first place.

The above combination of causes, effects and explanations leads
to these further issues to be considered:
+ Pseudo-events are more dramatic: their staged element brings ‘manu-
factured spontaneity’ to news reporting. This can range from
reporters rather needlessly standing outside an appropriate

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