Among the misuses of technology, one is its use for publicity stunts and self-advertising gimmicks. People who are the anthropomorphic expressions of TS Eliot's hollow men resort to self-exhibitionism, which is perpetrated today through the digital rectangle, advertising panaflexes and billboards. They also adopt the avatar of influencers on social media to warp the public opinion and gloss their own image. Every public service or private enterprise is enacted like a theatrical performance, whether it's politics or education, business or talk shows. Aphoristic summation: we are living in the age of privileging spectacle over substance.

French theorist Guy Debord forewarned more than half a century ago that the modern world would end up becoming "the society of the spectacle". In The Society of the Spectacle, he contends: "The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity........

© The Express Tribune