From the Society of the Spectacle to the Digital Carnival
Digital media have reversed the society of the spectacle into a society of ostentation, where not only elite actors but everyone bombards everyone with their desired selfies, presented in various forms—from silly GIFs and food photos to short videos and sophisticated Substacks. Read more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution.
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” wrote Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle.
The idea of an induced, consumerism-driven reality was common in the postmodernist philosophy of the electronic era. As capitalist production saturated the market with goods and services, the focus of production shifted from material utility toward symbolic value.
“For a long time, capital had only to produce goods; consumption ran by itself...,” wrote Jean Baudrillard. “Today it is necessary to produce consumers, to produce demand, and this production is infinitely more costly than that of goods.”
Marketing became more crucial than production. Baudrillard argued that classical use-value and exchange-value must be extended with symbolic or “sign-value”—the value created by the “ideological genesis of needs,” mirroring Debord’s idea of “pseudo-needs.”
The picture of the world with induced needs absorbed the world itself. This simulation of reality was in fact a copy without original, a hyperreality shaped by simulacra, as Baudrillard called it, echoing Debord’s metaphor of the spectacle.
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The spectacle of the TV era did not commence the simulation of reality but elevated it to the total form of centralized, unified, and unifying broadcasting, through which simulacra and symbolic commodification entered the private lives of everyone.
But TV delivered the viewer to the scene only to observe. It provided the individual’s “empathic involvement” with news and distant others, but not actual engagement. Now, digital media deliver the user to interact. This is where the individual becomes a true actor.
The TV spectacle used to feature professional performers—journalists, politicians, TV hosts, celebrities, academics. The emancipation of authorship allowed ordinary users to cast themselves. The cast reversed from the few to the many.
TV used imagery for empathic involvement to numb and hypnotize viewers: the electronic spectacle exploited impressions. But the digital spectacle offered a dictating affordance for users’ digital actions, reversing involvement into engagement.
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Journalists might recall how, in 2015, a “pivot to video” was meant to save the news. The pivot happened—but not in journalism. Instead, reels and TikTok took over the function of TV spectacle, starring not professionals but ordinary people with an endless supply of creativity.
Short videos have become a new digital obsession. Pulling one another like cars on a train, they are turning into a new kind of binge-watching. Older generations treat reels as residues of TV—they mostly watch. Among youth, shooting their own reels has become a must.
Short videos signified more than just a shift in media habits. Due to the addictive ease of posting, viewing, and sharing, short videos have become a new global form of media engagement, eroding even further the culture shaped by literacy, print, and broadcast media.
The affordability of video sharing reversed the industrial production of the spectacle into Bakhtin’s medieval carnival, the village-fair theatrical show, commedia dell’arte, and the traveling circus—with their people-powered humor, folk bawdry, and bizarre menagerie.
Just as podcasters have become bards of the digital era, short videos have retrieved folklore in a new, digital form. Reels did not just emancipate video authorship—the carnivalesque of reels intercepted the role-modeling power of TV and freed it from elite control.
Debord’s electronic spectacle flipped into a digital spectacle with a great variety of genres. Some genres of reels mimic TV formats, but many emerged specifically for this medium. TikTok dance became eponymous for the format, though it’s mostly popular among younger users.
The genre variety is still in its early phase, yet it can already entertain people in all kinds of moods: sports and movie clips, comedy skits, life hacks, cooking, fitness routines, motivational tips and their mockery, cute or deadly animals, dating and family humor—you name it.
Eroticism and profanity, cuteness and cringe, humanness and brutality, carnivalesque humor, satire, and mockery drive these genres in the directions the public favors most. Users direct the digital spectacle not only with their likes and shares, but by restaging favorite motifs.
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Not coincidentally, reality TV emerged in the 1990s—right during the transition from the TV era to digital. It was a “behavioral” link between Debord’s professional, elite-driven spectacle and the amateur theatrical ostentation of the social media era.
Reality show participants were regular people—though carefully picked to represent a pool of identities. That’s the pinnacle of Debord’s spectacle: regular people cast to star as regular people on display, midway between the TV spectacle and amateur self-casting on social media.
The main genre feature of reality TV—“unscripted but staged”—could serve as a motto for all social media platforms, especially image-based ones like Instagram and TikTok. “Unscripted but staged” has become the essence of performative living on display—an effect of digital media.
In reality shows, participants live their lives—then suddenly get called to the camera for “confessionals” to comment on events, explain themselves, and express their feelings. The “confessional” was a transition between the diary of the literate era and posting on social media.
Reality show participants exhibited collaboration and competition, caring and bullying, support and ostracism, parity and domination—all in view not just of their own tribe, but of a global audience, through excessively ostensive behavior.
By putting private lives on display, reality TV mixed orality and literacy much like digital orality does today. But it was more of a “division of labor”: participants acted out tribal orality, while the audience, still tethered to literate norms, only peeked in from the outside.
Strange as it may sound, peeping is a distant effect of literacy. Peeping is linked to intimacy, and intimacy emerged from the private space of individualism, a direct effect of writing. There could be no intimacy in oral-tribal settings—and therefore no peeping.
Reality TV fused the tribal exposure of private lives with the audience’s peeping gaze—turning it into peep-show business, a forerunner of many formats on social media (OnlyFans is one of the examples) and of their digital carnival of ostentation in general.
Now millions of social media users participate in the same kind of Truman Show—except this one is democratized: users themselves produce, direct, and star in it, willingly and without contractual obligation. Yet the competition for appreciation obliges almost like a contract.
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In the digital carnival, everyone performs. Posts, reels, memes—they’re all replays of available cultural scripts, sifted through users’ selfies. This filtration selects and actualizes what’s relevant. The digital carnival is the new Viral Editor, validating public significance.
Digital carnival is an endless performance of human extremes—emotions, ambitions, identities. In pursuit of affirmation, we craft symbolic extensions of self—digital masks—and replay ourselves in variations, again and again. Digital media carnivalize identity.
According to Bakhtin, medieval carnival suspended normal hierarchies and rules. This created a utopian space of egalitarian possibilities to safely vent the masses’ anxiety with the social order and, in fact, reaffirm that order while mocking it.
Like any oral tradition, carnival was agonistic—it challenged norms and authority, much like Gurri’s revolt of the public, but within a limited venue of pretense. This agonism was essential for reimagining the established order, mocking its leaders, and testing the boundaries.
It’s not like Brazilian Carnival, with its colorful celebration of the body, rhythm, and life. Medieval carnival, according to Bakhtin, was a symbolic and structural inversion of official order: full of role-swapping, grotesque mockery, and agonism—full of reversals.
Medieval carnival was limited in time and space—digital carnival is not. What was once a temporary perversion or provocation tends now to become permanent in digital media. Digital carnival rejects and reverses social roles and hierarchies, creating its own social structures.
Mourning the demise of intellectualism in the newspaper era, Hermann Hesse wrote that everything had become feuilleton. In the TV era, Guy Debord claimed everything became the spectacle. With social media, everything turned into an agonistic carnival.
Read more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution. The entire book is written in tweets – 1295 of them—which makes it the first “tweetise” in history, a reversal of treatise.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
