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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. --This [[text ]] refers to the Hardcover edition.