Spectacle

<p>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? <i>Spectacle </i>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.</p>