Critical Discursive Psychology and the Society of the Spectacle: A Debordian Approach to Digital Technologies

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a critical framework that merges Critical Discursive Psychology (CDP) with Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle to explicate the discourses surrounding digital technologies. Although CDP offers an analytic lens for examining how language constructs subjectivities, identities and ideological frameworks, it has yet to fully address the logics of commodification that characterise digital capitalism, where technologies are discursively framed, commodified and consumed as images of empowerment, productivity and well‐being. Drawing on Debord's critique of mediated social relations, this paper proposes a Debord‐influenced CDP that situates discursive practices within broader economies of visibility and performance. Through this synthesis, I argue that discourses of self‐care, digital innovation, agency and autonomy function both to legitimise neoliberal ideals and to obscure structural inequalities underpinning technological development. The paper highlights how this combined framework can be employed to analyse and reveal the ideological dilemmas, subject positions and interpretative repertoires that reinforce the spectacle of digital technologies and, in doing so, it can challenge psychology's complicity in reproducing these logics. Through the integration of discursive micro‐analysis with Debord's macro‐critical lens, this approach advances a politically attuned methodology for examining the intersection of language, technology and power in contemporary digital culture.