See Dean, Publicity's Secret, 72-73.
A thorough historical analysis of the contribution would spell out the steps involved in the uncoupling of messages from responses. Such an analysis would draw out the ways that responses to the broadly cast messages of television programs were configured as attention and measured in terms of ratings. Nielsen families, in other words, responded for the rest of us. Yet as work in cultural studies, media, and communicatio�s has repeatedly emphasized, ratings are not responses and provide little insight into the actual responses of viewers. These actual responses, we can say, are uncoupled from the broadcast message and incorporated into other circuits of communication.
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1:·Reason and the Rational� ization of Society.
1.5 See Zizek, The Sublime Object ofldeology.
Barabasi, Linked, 63. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text.
Galloway, Protocol, 33·
Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, 21.
This is Qne of my primary disagreements with Guy Debord. In addition to relying on a notion of spectacle more suited to mass than personal media, he views the spectacle as supported by an underlying secrecy. See his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.
For example, the conservative CAT o Institute held a conference in 2004 titled "The Republican Revolution Ten Years Later: Smaller Government or Business as Usual?"
21 Harvey, A Brief History ofNeoliberalism, 49·
22 Ibid., 42-43·
23 Describing the failure of mainstream feminism to fight for welfare guarantees for poor mothers, Gwendolyn Mink writes, ''A white and middle-class solipsism enforced a general feminist silence about the stakes of welfare provisions for poor women, and that silence gave permission to policy-makers to treat punitive welfare reform as a no-lose situation. Welfare reform did not bear directly on the lives of most white middle-class feminists, and so they did not mobilize their networks and raise their voices as they have in defending abortion rights or protesting domestic violence," Welfare's End, 7·
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NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
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