Publicity`s secret, Dean, Jodi

In recent decades, media outlets in the United States—most notably the Internet—have claimed to serve the publics ever-greater thirst for information. Scandals are revealed, details are laid bare because the public needs to know. In Publicitys Secret, Jodi Dean claims that the publics demands for information both coincide with the interests of the media industry and reinforce the cynicism promoted by contemporary technoculture. Democracy has become a spectacle, and Dean asserts that theories of the public sphere endanger democratic politics in the information age.Deans argument is built around analyses of Bill Gates, Theodore Kaczynski, popular journalism, the Internet and technology, as well as the conspiracy theory subculture that has marked American history from the Declaration Independence to the political celebrity of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The author claims that the medias insistence on the publics right to know leads to the indiscriminate investigation and dissemination of secrets. Consequently, in her view, the theoretical ideal of the public sphere, in which all processes are transparent, reduces real-world politics to the drama of the secret and its discovery.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Communicative Capitalism: The Ideological Matrix
1. Publicity's Secret
2. Conspiracy's Desire
3. Little Brothers
4. Celebrity's Drive
Conclusion: Neo-DemocracyNotes
Index