The core of the Situationist idea of The Society of the Spectacle is mediation. The idea is that people are no longer allowed to experience anything directly; instead events are packaged, explained, sanitized and force-fed to to the experiencer. They are spectacularized.

The evening news on TV is a good example of this phenomenon: events, even in the viewers' own community, are packaged into 15 second sound bites, with the implication that the event outside the sound bite is actually less real than the encapsulation. This serves to sharpen the line between subject and object, dividing the world between actors and those who observe events on TV, removing the idea of any responsibility, or even possibility of action, from the watchers.

The Situationist antidote to this was to create situations, events where the line between subject and object could be blurred again, shocking The Masses into some sort of action, in a sort of prototypical guerilla street theater. The ultimate situation that was created this way was probably the May of 1968 uprising.