I think most folks are missing the real point here . . .
Society of the Spectacle 1973 film directed by Guy DeBord based on his 1960's classic of the same name
http://vimeo.com/60945809 "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."
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". In his [1988] follow-up book, '
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle', Debord referred to the spectacle as coming to existence in the late 1920s.
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."
In his analysis of the spectacular society, Debord notes that quality of life is impoverished, with such lack of authenticity,
human perceptions are affected, and there's also a degradation of knowledge, with the hindering of critical thought. Debord analyzes the use of knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present; in this way the spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Spectacle