Abstracts Anthropology

Happiness and Spectacle: sociocultural analysis from the digital and political scene of Medellin, Colombia, at the beginning of the 21st century

by Carlos Felipe Castro Arcila

This research, supported by various areas of the social sciences -with special participation of psychology, philosophy, anthropology, marketing, history and sociology-, begun with the hypothesis that the theory of the spectacle that Guy Debord (1967) developed keeps some relevance and can contribute to the understanding of happiness in the West at the beginning of the 21st century. Debord's spectacle is a socio-political concept that emerged as an answer to the impact of the massification of televised advertising in France in the mid-20th century, and its premise was that the image, unilaterally produced by consumer markets in order to create mercantile desires and yearnings, gave mankind a choice between continuing to exist in real life or escaping to an ideal world where entertainment numbs the senses, alienating man from his own life, turning him into a spectator of it. Happiness, which changed throughout the written history of the West -between the Greek eudaimonia, the Christian beatitude through suffering, the Protestant rebellion, the industrialization and a new relationship of man with his basic needs and his notion of rights and duties-, faced a clash in the twentieth century between the competition of producers for the consumer and the appearance of new information and communication technologies that seek to produce a happiness of sorts through tools designed to modify human behaviour. With the support of a study of the digital scene of Medellin at the beginning of the 21st century, this research offers means for the understanding of the relationship between happiness and a new spectacle whose message became multilateral, in which the mechanisms of engagement include algorithms that interpret and affect both the social life and the resistance to the system that contains them.