Guy Debord, one of the well-known participants of a radical group active in the middle of the twentieth century called the Situationist International (SI), would have detested mobile media. Further, his theories that were to change society have played out in the social media website, Facebook. Some say that Debord's book of theses The Society of the Spectacle is the unofficial manuscript of the group (Johnston, Gregory, Pratt, and Watts). Debord’s description of “the spectacle” could easily be a description of mobile media, and his theories on situations and the dérive can certainly be used to describe Facebook. Like many thinkers that came before, such as the Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists, Guy Debord was reacting against established society. The fact that his theories have played out such as the theories of political radicals before him to describe the actions of popular society would have been a great disappointment to the man who was a progenitor of the SI.
Debord was born in Paris in 1931 and grew up in Cannes. His family had quite a bit of money and possessions that they lost due to the economic crisis felt throughout the world in the 1930s. Rather than try to obtain that wealth once again or ascribe to the expectations of bourgeois life, Debord decided to follow a “life of adventure” and align himself with radical political groups in Paris in the 1950s. He was part of a group called the Lettrists that eventually morphed into the Situationist International. Debord wrote many screenplays that were published in each group’s journal (although their journals would be what we now would call a zine). In addition to contributing to the journals for the groups with which he was affiliated, he published what has been considered his most famous work and the unofficial manifesto of the SI, The Society of the Spectacle. This work has been described as “one of the most radical critiques ever assembled of the modern appearance of capitalism…rejecting all previous leftist positions, which at one time or another had all claimed for themselves, at least in name, the same philosophical traditions” (Ohrt).
