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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
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