What is "the society of the spectacle"? In the opening thesis of his book of that name, Guy Debord offers a concise explanation. "The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Reading these lines today, you might wonder why Debord's concept of spectacle has gained a reputation for being oblique and elusive. In the context of 21st-century culture, these words sound less like philosophy, and more like a straightforward description of the dominant role that profit-driven media spectacles play in the communication flows of public life, from the DSK affair and the royal wedding to the News of the World debacle.

If we go on to read the 200 additional theses on spectacle that proceed from here, each one as grim and sweeping as the first, this feeling will get worse. In one, Debord defines the spectacle as "the economic realm developing for itself", which is to say in the sole interest of expanding new markets for profit – a prospect all too familiar to anyone who has ever owned an iPhone or iPad that was rendered obsolete before the wireless contract required for the privilege of buying it.

In another, he writes: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images," a characterisation that is just as easy to envision as the triumphant motto of Facebook or YouTube as a screed against the experience of "generalised separation" that Debord deems the only form of social unity available in such a "relationship". Again and again, then, the image of spectacle finds its most immediate expression in the infrastructure that binds the market imperatives of capitalism ever more tightly to the mass-mediated communities of "social media", not to mention the industry of personal data collection and micro-targeted viral advertising that drives it. If the spectacle exists, as Debord tells us, "wherever representation takes on an independent existence" then it's safe to assume that the computer-manufactured credit derivatives associated with the collapse of the American economy in 2008 count as one of the many forms of the spectacle.

The danger with this reading – the spectacle as a retroactive name for the social alienation of modern media culture – is that it turns Debord into a prophet who simply confirms everything we already know and further cements its inevitability. In other words, it is to make The Society of the Spectacle into precisely the kind of spectacle that Debord warns us of in thesis five, where he insists that the spectacle is not a simple product of mass media, but "a weltanschauung that has been actualised, translated into the material realm – a world view transformed into an objective force".

The question, then, is how to read Debord more philosophically. At least to my thinking, reading Debord's idea of spectacle in this way begins by recognising that when he uses the terms "image" and "representation", he is using them both literally and as metaphors. He is referring not only to the images that appear on a television screen or in a magazine, but also every "vision" of an ideal social whole, whether it comes from the commercial world or from philosophy and art. Put otherwise, Debord is pointing to the pose of intellectual and physical passivity we adopt when we entertain a vision of total social unity that can be abstracted in a theoretical formula, a political slogan, a product or a picture. He is pointing to the ease with which the very ideal of social unity can be appropriated and sold back to us in the form of material goods and political imperatives whenever we allow someone else to tell us what it is, should be, or can be.

He is highlighting the ways in which this process of social abstraction actually codifies a current order of social existence by removing it from the dynamic material vigour of our own lives, minds and activities. And while the ominous possibilities of such a scenario certainly apply to the promise of social "connectivity" that comes pre-loaded on Twitter and all the other technological gadgets and apps that so consume us today, they apply just as much to the orthodox communism of the Stalinist state; to the abstract vision of universalism that drives transcendental philosophies and religion alike; and to the global entertainment franchises that dominate 21st-century life, including everything from Britain's Got Talent and its countless national counterparts around the world to the World Cup.

Accordingly, Debord's concept of spectacle may hold the greatest importance for a discussion of the big ideas of today because it serves as an emphatic reminder that unless we take pleasure in thinking dynamically about the role spectacles play in shaping our social existence, we will find ourselves as extras in whatever scene they establish. At a moment when the spectacle of the global stock market is increasingly taken for granted as an indisputable justification for dismantling various social programmes, we must learn to mobilise the critical resources of spectacle as ingeniously as Debord's own text does.

Doing so will not only require that we continue to make a spectacle of our dissent, gleaning lessons from the protest movements taking shape around the world, from Wall Street to Cairo. It will also require that we redouble our efforts to challenge the systematic elimination of philosophy departments and humanities funding from university programmes all over the world – a project of austerity economics that deems the study of ideas simultaneously elitist, irrelevant to the "real" world and without market value. For as Debord makes clear, when we allow the pleasures of living and acting to become severed from the pleasures of thinking and looking, The Society of the Spectacle can mean only one thing. And it will do so until we learn to reconnect them.