Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle describes the dissolution of the public sphere, the open terrain of political exchange and participation, in favor of an integrated and diffuse apparatus of images and discourse that produces and regulates public discourse and opinion, through a technology of separation.
Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish reviews the demise of punishment as public spectacle and the internalization of discipline. While Debord seems to be chronicling the rise of spectacle instead of its wane, Debord's concept of spectacle is ultimately an internalized one as well.
Like Foucault's conception of power, is Debord's version of spectacle is both diffuse and integrated, everywhere and nowhere, as if there were a point of central control. Both Debord and Foucault outline diffuse mechanisms of power, through which imperatives of normalization or conformity permeate most layers of social activity and become subjectively internalized. For Debord, the spectacle imposes a new mass sociality, a new uniformity of thought and action. In the society of the spectacle, only that which appears exists, and the major media have something approaching a monopoly over what appears to the general population. (From Hardt and Negri, also J. Crary Suspensions of Perception, p.74)
But spectacle is not primarily concerned with looking at images but rather with the creation of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous. The logic of spectacle prescribes the production of separate, isolated, but not introspective individuals.