Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy

By Jodi Dean
Cornell University Press 2002 224 pages
ISBN 0801486785

Reviewed by Chris Cobb
ldr@leonardo.org

As a country we need to rethink how our language is being used. Jodi Dean points to how politicians and the media use language in tricky ways. All too often their verbal tricks are sensationalistic and calculated to provoke a response. That is different from the underlying assumption the public has. Dean discusses how the popular belief in truth in reporting and fairness in the media is almost entirely a myth. Reality, when filtered through politicians or the media, is like seeing a movie instead of reading the book it was based on. Fundamentally the political and news dialogs are market-driven and profit-driven. For example - how did a national discussion about corporate reform morph into a proposed fiscal policy that gives corporations huge tax cuts? The very debate and eventually the law - is being shaped by how language is used. The only problem, according to Dean, is that no one is asking questions. Jodi Dean should be thanked. She has done several important things in her new book and the value of these things are enormous. First, she has updated the terminology of George Orwell, which has been long over due. She examines the concept of Big Brother in the Orwellian sense and treats it as critical theory. She then introduces the idea of what in practice has become a society of ‘little brothers’ at the moment, forming basically a decentralized Big Brother. Dean also suggests that the public will not put up with outrageous power grabs in technology or politics unless they are incremental and couched in the language of consumerism. Making your life easier and helping you save time, etc. In addition, Dean uses contemporary mythologies to explain how the world has been created and shaped by media images for the purpose of perpetuating the values in the market place. For example, she uses the movie Matrix as a multi-level metaphor to reveal how many of the values of our democratic society have been manufactured through the media conception of the ‘Public Sphere’. The public’s need to know all, and the idea that newness is goodness are virtually unquestioned by consumers. In Publicity’s Secret, Dean’s voice joins a number of other intellectuals such as Ishmael Reed, Joshua Micah Marshall and Eric Alterman that have come out in favor of critical thinking in our age of Homeland Security Departments and the Office of Truth management. With a little luck maybe others will follow their lead.