"A thoughtful treatise on how popular representations of nature, through entertainment and tourism, shape how we imagine environmental problems and their solutions"--Provided by publisher.

Through analysis of several media spectacles - including the O.J. Simpson trial, Elvis, the X-Files and the Clinton sex scandals - Kellner draws insights into media, journalism, the public sphere and politics in an era of new technologies.

Global media and advances in technology have profoundly affected the way people experience events. The essays in this volume explore the dimensions of contemporary spectacles from the Arab Spring to spectatorship in Hollywood. Questioning the effects that spectacles have on their observers, the authors ask: Are viewers robbed of their autonomy, transformed into depoliticized and passive consumers, or rather are they drawn in to cohesive communities? Does their participation in an event�as audiences, activists, victims, tourists, and critics�change and complicate the event itself? Spectacle looks closely at the permeable boundaries between the reality and fiction of such events, the methods of their construction, and the implications of those methods.

NASCAR, Sturgis, and the New Economy of Spectacle vividly illustrates how legendary spectacles, such as those in NASCAR racing and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, generate a triple-circuit of profit.

Debord describes and critiques the way we live. The power in these ideas lies in their ability to question, identify, and name the common assumptions of the present. Developing the concept of The Spectacle, he describes the “gaze” of contemporary society. From its publication just before, and ultimately influencing the May 1968 revolt in Paris and Occupy Wall Street, this book continues to transform a wide range of progressive philosophical and political movements, most notably anti-capitalism, postmodernism, marxism, and anarchism. This new translation brings a concrete edge to the text, elaborating upon the original, and adding annotations. Bringing fifty years of prominent radical thinking back to the text, from Baudrillard to Odell to Zuboff—it’s clear that Debords’ book is more relevant in the era of social media, the attention economy, and the emergence of Surveillance Capitalism than ever before.

The second edition of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World updates Donald G. Kyle’s award-winning introduction to this topic, covering the Ancient Near East up to the late Roman Empire. • Challenges traditional scholarship on sport and spectacle in the Ancient World and debunks claims that there were no sports before the ancient Greeks • Explores the cultural exchange of Greek sport and Roman spectacle and how each culture responded to the other’s entertainment • Features a new chapter on sport and spectacle during the Late Roman Empire, including Christian opposition to pagan games and the Roman response • Covers topics including violence, professionalism in sport, class, gender and eroticism, and the relationship of spectacle to political structures