ABSTRACT
This chapter looks beyond the role of public relations to take a broader sociological and philosophical look at the attention economy, the tyranny of appearance and the consequences of a culture fixated by speed and spectacle. Shakespeare’s plays abound in masquerade, both in formal masked balls and in the prolific use of disguise to create the kind of double meaning Schechner describes. In the 18th century masquerade, disguise conferred license, as the mask enabled behaviours forbidden to the unmasked. In Society of the Spectacle, first published in 1967, Debord argues that this is to miss the nature of spectacle, offering “no way of comprehending the true extent of the present society’s domination by images”. The diagnosis of cultural narcissism has grown stronger in recent years, fuelled by the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US President.
