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218 Critical Theories of Mass Media
4 McLuhan was aware of the provisional nature of his reading of
television, and that a shift in technology could render them
redundant. He responded to the possibility of television becom-
ing a ‘hot’, or high-definition, image by asserting that a television
image that attained the informational density of cinematic image,
would no longer be television but a new medium – an issue that
has become increasingly relevant with the advent of high-
definition, large and widescreen, home cinema set-ups.

Chapter 5
1 The passages cited here are taken from Freddy Perlman and John
Supak’s translation, The Society of the Spectacle (Debord 1977),
which is widely available online. References refer to the text’s
numbered sections (N), which remain constant across various
translations.
2 And later again by Jameson (1998) with his concept of the
dialectic of reification.
3 In some of the latest theoretical accounts of such developments
this process is referred to as bio-politics as seen in the work of
Hardt and Negri (2000, 2005), Poster (2006) and Jenkins (2006a,
2006b).
4 Paradoxically, this is evident even in his films, from his earliest
experiments which refuted cinema’s visuality by subjecting its
audience to hour-long monologues accompanying a blank screen,
to his later film which delivered a commentary on images that
heaped contempt on them, and on their audience.
5 Gresham’s Law is a concept in economics whereby upon the
introduction of counterfeit money, people will tend to hoard
legitimate currency and try to spend the false money. The overall
effect is that the counterfeit money becomes a greater proportion
of the overall money in circulation as the good money is
withdrawn and hoarded.
6 ‘Preface to the third French edition’, The Society of the Spectacle,
trans. David Nicholson-Smith (Debord 1994).

Chapter 6
1 For more general overviews of celebrity see Evans and Hesmond-
halgh (2005) and Turner (2004).
2 Pop Idol-type programmes provide a topical illustration of this
process. Various niche alternatives (rock, heavy metal, ‘bad’
boy/girl singer and so on) are presented to viewers as genuine
evidence of the musical choice on offer, when in fact, they are
often geared to maximize the demographic appeal and hence

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