Rashmi

In 1967, a French philosopher named Guy Debord published ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, a seminal text critiquing contemporary consumer culture, mass media and the pacification of people’s minds through the bombardment of imagery- which he terms as the ‘Spectacle’. He writes, ’In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’  Today, architectural practices and its allied fields seem to have reached that point where the image has superseded the lived. Here, ‘What appears is good; what is good appears.’ The emergence of numerous digital magazines operating in tandem with social media algorithms have only accelerated this phenomenon. Where the medium one works through, drastically alters the way we respond to, write about and manifest design thinking. Agreed that platforms like Instagram, Pinterest etc. give a sense of agency, auto...