In the age of the spectacle, democracy has never looked so bleak. Our world, saturated with media and marketing, endlessly confronts us with spectacles vying for our attention: from Apple and 9/11 to Facebook and the global financial crisis. Democratic politics, by comparison, remain far from engaging. A society obsessed with spectacles results in a complete misfiring of the democratic system. This book uses critical democratic theory to outline the effects of consumer culture on citizenship. It highlights the importance that public space plays in creating the critical culture necessary for a healthy democracy, and outlines how contemporary 'public' spaces - shopping centres, the Internet, social networking sites and suburban communities - contribute to this culture. Terrorism, ecological destruction and the financial crisis are also outlined as symptoms of the politics of the spectacle. The book concludes with some basic principles and novel suggestions which could be employed to avoid the pitfalls inherent in our spectacular existence.

Media pervade and saturate the world around us. From the proliferation of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to television, radio, newspapers, films, games and email, media is inescapable. This book, using some of Deleuze's key concepts as its starting point, offers a new systematic analysis of how media functions in our lives, and how we function through our media. While Harper and Savat take Deleuze as the starting point, they extend and define his concepts, pointing out advances made by theorists such as Marx, Mumfors, McLuhan and Williams in the attempt to answer the most Deleuzean of questions, 'what is it that media do?'

Media pervade and saturate the world around us. From the proliferation of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to television, radio, newspapers, films, games and email, media is inescapable. This book, using some of Deleuze's key concepts as its starting point, offers a new systematic analysis of how media functions in our lives, and how we function through our media. While Harper and Savat take Deleuze as the starting point, they extend and define his concepts, pointing out advances made by theorists such as Marx, Mumfors, McLuhan and Williams in the attempt to answer the most Deleuzean of questions, 'what is it that media do?'