Was 9/11 the first time you became aware of the impact of media spectacle on our lives? A few of us, including fans of Godard and the Glasgow Media Research Unit, will have followed Situationist debates around Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and the May ’68 events. Fewer still might have absorbed the critique launched by Douglas Kellner of Debord’s “neo-Marxian perspective on hegemony” for failing to see that media spectacles could also be contested. But nowadays we all need to be much more literate about the timing and presentation of “those attention-grabbing occurrences that we call ‘news’.”
Will the UK be able to “open up fully” on June 21? Will the Indian variant put a spanner in these works? Whatever the data, Johnson is keen on sticking to this date, (conveniently preceded by Joe Biden’s visit to Britain from June 11 -13 for a meeting of the G7), so that he can distract the British people with ‘best friends’ and ‘good news’ stories, presumably until they have forgotten to care about the handling of covid-19, roughly estimated to coincide with the promised public enquiry in the spring of 2022.
Very occasionally, as Gerry Hassan reminded openDemocracy in his heartwarming article on May 18 – ‘It’s not often you defeat Priti Patel’: Will Glasgow be a wake-up call?’ – people manage to give the powers that be a taste of their own medicine.
