Cover not available
Article published In:
Argumentation in the Media
Edited by Darrin Hicks
[Journal of Argumentation in Context 3:1] 2014
► pp. 7–34

Public argument in the new media ecology

Implications of temporality, spatiality, and cognition

 | Baruch College — City University of New York
This article argues that argumentation studies need to engage contemporary theories of new media technologies and culture in order to understand how public argument is empirically embedded. The article discusses the new media ecology with regard to contemporary scholarship and theory around digital cultural subjectivity and cognition, affect, professional political communication, information overload, diffusion, cybernetics and biopower — all arguably essential to understanding public argument today. It then demonstrates one way of studying popular forms of public argument by analyzing rumor bombs. Finally, it proposes that contemporary public argument has a new spatiality and temporality and is thus fundamentally different that what was considered public argument in pre-Web 2.0 culture.
Keywords: public argument, new media, Internet, affect, cognition, rumor bomb, argumentation theory, attention economy, information overload
Published online: 7 May 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jaic.3.1.02har
References (79)
Baron, Naomi. 2008. Always On . New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bernays, Edward L. 2007. Propaganda . New York: Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.Google Scholar
Boynton, Rachel. 2006. Our Brand is Crisis . Koch Lorber Films. Google Scholar
Carr, Nicholas G. 2010. The Shallows . W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Castells, Manuel. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope . London: Polity.Google Scholar
Curtis, David. 2002. The Century of the Self . Documentary.Google Scholar
Damasio, Antonio. 2008. Descartes’ Error . New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Davies, Nick. 2011. Flat Earth News . Random House.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2000. A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia . London: Continuum.Google Scholar
de Spinoza, Benedictus, and G. H. R. Parkinson. 2000, Ethics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Doherty, Brendan J. 2012. The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign . University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Emmel, Barbara A. 1994. “Toward a Pedagogy of the Enthymeme. ” Rhetoric Review 13 (1): 132-49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eurostat. 2012. “Internet use in households and by individuals in 2012.” December. Accessed February 5, 2013. [URL].
Ewen, Stuart. 2008. Pr!: A Social History of Spin . Basic Books.Google Scholar
“Fact Check: So Who’s Checking the Fact-finders? We Are.” 2013. Accessed March 5. [URL].
Featherstone, Mark. 2008. “The State of the Network. ” Journal for Cultural Research 12 (2): 181-203. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fisher, Marc. 2012. “All the News that Confirms Your Views.” Washington Post January. [URL].
Forgas, Joseph P., Orsoyla Vincze, and János László, (eds). 2013. Social Cognition and Communication . Psychology Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Franks, David D. 2010. Neurosociology . New York: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Galloway, Alexander R. 2006. “Language Wants To Be Overlooked.” Journal of Visual Culture 5 (3): 315-31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit . University Of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Gao, Helen. 2012. “Rumor, Lies, and Weibo: How Social Media is Changing the Nature of Truth in China.” The Atlantic . April. [URL].
Gerhards, Jürgen, and Mike S. Schafer. 2010. “Is the Internet a Better Public Sphere?” New Media & Society 12 (1): 143-60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goodnight, G. Thomas. 1981/2012. “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument.” Argumentation & Advocacy 48 (4): 198-210 (Reprinted from 1981, The Journal of The American Forensic Association, vol. 18: 214-227). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012. “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres: A Note on 21st Century Critical Communication Inquiry.” Argumentation & Advocacy 48 (4): 258-67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Green, Melanie C., and John K. Donahue. 2011a. “Persistence of Belief Change in the Face of Deception.“ Media Psychology 14 (3): 312-31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greene, Ronald Walter, and Heather Ashley Hayes. 2012. “Rhetorical Materialism: The Cognitive Division of Labor and the Social Dimensions of Argument. ” Argumentation & Advocacy 88 (3): 190-3. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harding, James. 2008. Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business . Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Harsin, Jayson. 2006. “The Rumour Bomb: Theorising the Convergence of New and Old Trends in Mediated US Politics.” Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture 39 (1): 84-110.Google Scholar
2010a. “Diffusing the Rumor Bomb: ‘John Kerry Is French’(i.e., Haughty, Foppish, Elitist, Socialist, Cowardly, and Gay).” The Diffusion of Social Movements: Actors, Mechanisms, and Political Effects , 163-183. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010b. “That’s Democratainment: Obama, Rumor Bombs, and Primary Definers.” Flow 13 (1). [URL].Google Scholar
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hicks, Darrin, and Lenore Langsdorf. 1999. “Regulating Disagreement, Constituting Participants.” Argumentation 13 (2): 139-60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
“IPI News Contest: Bridging the Fact-checking Gap in Africa.” 2013. Accessed March 5. [URL].
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. 1988. Eloquence in an Electronic Age . New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1993. Dirty Politics . New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Ralph. 2000. Manifest rationality: A pragmatic theory of argument . Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Jones, Jeffrey P. 2009. “Believable Fictions.” In The Changing Faces of Journalism , 127-143. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar
Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow . New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Knapp, Robert H. 1944. “A Psychology of Rumor.” Public Opinion Quarterly 8 (1): 22-37. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstiel. 1999. Warp Speed . Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
2010. Blur . New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 2008. The Political Mind . Viking.Google Scholar
Leander, Kevin M., and Kelly McKim. 2003. “Tracing the Everyday ‘sitings’ of Adolescents on the Internet.” Education, Communication & Information 3 (2): 211-40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ladd, Jonathan McDonald. 2010. “The Role of Media Distrust in Partisan Voting.” Political Behavior 32 (4): 567–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leccese, Mark. 2009. “Online Information Sources of Political Blogs.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 86 (3): 578-93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Justin, Andrew Williams, and Bob Franklin. 2008. “Four Rumours and an Explanation.” Journalism Practice 2 (1): 27-45. [URL]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lodge, Milton, and Charles S. Taber. 2005. “The Automaticity of Affect for Political Leaders, Groups, and Issues.” Political Psychology 26 (3): 455-82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Massumi, Brian. 1993. The Politics of Everyday Fear . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
2005. “Fear (the Spectrum Said).” Positions 13 (1): 31-48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McChesney, Robert Waterman, and John Nichols. 2010. The Death and Life of American Journalism . Washington D.C.: Nation Books.Google Scholar
McLuhan, Marshall. 2001. Understanding Media . New York: Routledge Classics.Google Scholar
Meeks, David. 2012. “Poll: Obama’s a Muslim to Many GOP Voters in Alabama, Mississippi.” Los Angeles Times . Accessed March 17, 2012. [URL].Google Scholar
Miller, Shane. 2002. “Conspiracy Theories. ” Argumentation & Advocacy 39 (1): 40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mosk, Matthew. 2008. “An Attack that Came Out of the Ether,” June. Washington Post. Accessed January 28, 2013. [URL].
“News Leaders and the Future.” Project for Excellence in Journalism. Accessed February 5, 2013. [URL].
Pariser, Eli. 2011. The Filter Bubble . Penguin UK.Google Scholar
Pendleton, Susan.1998. “Rumor Research Revisited and Expanded.” Language & Communication 18 (1): 69–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ramsey, Clay, Steven Kull, Evan Lewis, and Stefan Subia. 2010. “Misinformation and the 2010 Election: A Study of the U.S. Electorate.” Accessed January 10, 2011. [URL]
Ritzer, George, and Nathan Jurgenson. 2010. “Production, Consumption, Prosumption. ” Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (1): 13-36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Aaron. 2013. “Cell Internet Use 2012 | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.” Accessed March 4. [URL].
Smith, Christina M., and Kelly M. McDonald. 2010. “The Arizona 9/11 Memorial.” Argumentation & Advocacy 47 (2): 123-39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
“Snopes Exposed?” 2013. About.com Urban Legends. Accessed March 5. [URL].
Spillius, Alex. 2010. “Barack Obama Calls Shirley Sherrod over False Charges of Racism.” Telegraph.co.uk , July 23. Accessed March 8, 2013. [URL]Google Scholar
Spivak, Cary. 2011. “The Fact-Checking Explosion | American Journalism Review.” January. [URL].
Sussman, Gerald, and Lawrence Galizio. “The Global Reproduction of American Politics.” Political Communication , 20 (3): 309-28. DOI logo
Sutherland, Thomas. 2013. “Liquid Networks and the Metaphysics of Flux.” Theory, Culture & Society 30 (5): 3-23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Terranova, Tiziana. 2012. “Attention, Economy and the Brain.” Culture Machine 131. [URL].Google Scholar
Tindale, Christopher William. 2011. “Character and Knowledge.” Argumentation 251: 341-53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomkins, Silvan Solomon, and Carroll Ellis Izard. 1966. Affect, Cognition and Personality . Tavistock PublicationsGoogle Scholar
Tulis, Jeffrey. 1987. The Rhetorical Presidency . Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Vedantam, Shankar. 2007. “Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach.” The Washington Post , September 4, sec. World. [URL].Google Scholar
“Viral Facebook post on CEO-worker pay ratio has obscure past.” 2011. PolitiFact . Accessed March 5, 2013. [URL].
Virilio, Paul. 2000. The Information Bomb . London, New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas. 2007. Media Argumentation . London: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weger, Harry Jr., and Mark Aakhus. 2003. “Arguing in Internet Chat Rooms.” Argumentation & Advocacy 40 (1): 23-38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Westen, Drew. 2007. The Political Brain . Washington D.C.: PublicAffairs.Google Scholar
Zajonc, Robert B. 1980. “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences.” American Psychologist 35 (2): 151. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000. “Feeling and Thinking: Closing the Debate over the Independence of Affect.” In Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition , 31-58. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cited by (9)

Cited by nine other publications

Van Schenck, Reed
2024. Gamer publics: live-stream debate networks and the mediation of argument in the digital attention economy. Argumentation and Advocacy ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Jenkins, Eric S. & Monica Huzinec
2021. Memeability in an Attention Economy: On the Form of the Nike Kaepernick Meme. Southern Communication Journal 86:4 ► pp. 402 ff. DOI logo
Harsin, Jayson
2015. Regimes of Posttruth, Postpolitics, and Attention Economies. Communication, Culture & Critique 8:2 ► pp. 327 ff. DOI logo
Harsin, Jayson
2017. Trump l’Œil: Is Trump's Post-Truth Communication Translatable?. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 21:5 ► pp. 512 ff. DOI logo
Harsin, Jayson
2018. Tactical Connecting and (Im-)Mobilizing in the French Boycott School Day Campaign and Anti-Gender Theory Movement. In Global Cultures of Contestation, ► pp. 193 ff. DOI logo
Harsin, Jayson
2018. Post-Truth Populism: The French Anti-Gender Theory Movement and Cross-Cultural Similarities. Communication, Culture and Critique 11:1 ► pp. 35 ff. DOI logo
Harsin, Jayson
2019. Political Attention: A Genealogy of Reinscriptions. In Communication in the Era of Attention Scarcity, ► pp. 75 ff. DOI logo
Harsin, Jayson
2024. Post-truth Politics and Epistemic Populism: About (Dis-)Trusted Presentation and Communication of Facts, Not False Information. In Post-Truth Populism [Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, ], ► pp. 25 ff. DOI logo
Harsin, Jayson
2024. Three Critiques of Disinformation (For-Hire) Scholarship: Definitional Vortexes, Disciplinary Unneighborliness, and Cryptonormativity. Social Media + Society 10:1 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.