Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy

by Jodi Dean

In recent decades, media outlets in the United States―most notably the Internet―have claimed to serve the public's ever-greater thirst for information. Scandals are revealed, details are laid bare because "the public needs to know." In Publicity's Secret , Jodi Dean claims that the public's 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. Dean's 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 media's insistence on the public's 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.

Genres: Politics, Theory

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2002

About the author

Jodi Dean teaches political and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited eleven books, including The Communist Horizon and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

Reviews

[Frankie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not nail-smashing but definitely a different way of coming at criticism of the public sphere.

168 "So, representationally, the Web is a zero institution. It provides an all-encompassing space in which social antagonism is simultaneously expressed and obliterated. It is a global space in which many can recognise themselves as connected to others, as linked to things that matter. At the same time, it is a space of conflicting networks and networks of conflict so deep and fundamental that even to speak of consensus, convergence, equality, or inclusion seems an act of violence."