With the term spectacle, Debord defines the system that is a confluence of advanced capitalism, the mass media, and the types of governments who favor those phenomena. “… the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring superficial manifestation…”.

The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes. “rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” (read more)