G. Thomas Goodnight

Rhetoric, Risk, and Markets: The Dot-Com Bubble

Post-conventional economic theories are assembled to inquire into the contingent, mimetic, symbolic, and material spirals unfolding the dot-com bubble, 1992–2002. The new technologies bubble is reconstructed as a rhetorical movement across the practices of the hybrid market-industry risk culture of communications. The legacies of the bubble task economic criticism with developing critical capacity sufficient to address attention-driven economies of worth.

The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres: A Note on 21St Century Critical Communication Inquiry

Inevitably, any theory of communication addresses the contexts of its times. The public sphere essay was written in 1982. Then, the world was on the edge of a Reagan-Thatcher revolution that would loose neo-liberalism and begin to dismantle the welfare state. The United States was enduring a deep recession due to efforts to control inflation brought about by the debt-financed Vietnam war and careless energy policies. The Cold War held sway. Apocalyptic rhetoric from the Oval Office called for new, computer-guided smart weapons. The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment fingered, as did issues of race and class left unaddressed by the Great Society. Mass media ruled the airwaves. Television and newspaper companies converged. Stylized political news turned sampling data into horse race thrills ramped up with sexy sound bites. Matters did call for national debate. However, little meaningful public discussion ensued. The linguistic turn, postmodernity, culture wars, migration, AIDS, globalization, and the explosion of digital media--all elements of a coming communication revolution--were readying in the wings. This essay revisits the beginnings of studies in the public sphere, initiated among these circumstances, as critical communication inquiry. Such inquiry identifies communication as symbolic interaction and offers contextual approaches to questions of language, society, and social change (Littlejohn, 1983, pp. 45-73). The essay proceeds to compare Jurgen Habermass neo-Kantian euro-centric declinist thesis against the notion of pluralistic argument spheres. A brief discussion of the prospects of 21st century studies of the public, technical, and personal spheres of argument is offered in conclusion. ARGUMENT SPHERES AND SOCIAL CONTEXTS My experiences with debate, graduate studies, and communication research had led me to believe that argumentation always, though unevenly, has fueled American democratic practices. Wil Linkugel introduced me to the study of public address at the University of Kansas through his ground-breaking courses in African-American rhetoric and in womens movements. In the discipline I knew, the key moments in the formation of publics featured insurgency, opposition, and sometimes revolutionary contestation (Holland, 1973). Indeed, colonists learned debate from The Columbian Orator (Bingham, 1797/1998) which offered diverse training in argumentation through reading and performance in classical literature and in the public disputes of the bustling multi-racial, multi-ethnic, garrulous young United States of America. The tradition of argumentation and debate as a form of practice continued through the 19th century in boisterous parades, public assemblies, civic performances, and oratorical addresses. Debate and interpretation were present in university life, too, changing over time to meet interests of emergent generations within and against the confines of university administration. In realizing ambitions to become a discipline, the study of communication performed a modern turn, too. Theory was brought on board to enable researchers to classify types or dimensions of communication and, thereby, to measure effects. Similarly, argumentation was theorized as a perspective taken on communication that could be analyzed by modeling practical reason (Brockriede, 1992). The turn I made in 1982 was to read the boundaries of communication in acts of argument. Such critical communication inquiry holds that any particular act of argument, custom of practice, or institutional convention carries with it expectations--which themselves could be granted and extended or disputed and taken to task. The test of taken-for-granted rules for communication is whether they are necessary or sufficient for the communicative work of agreement or disagreement. As a project, public sphere studies was a turn to keep in mind the argumentativeness of argument, the contingency of human cultural creations which define reasonableness or take exception to the unreasonable--always with an uncertain risk of being misplaced or simply wrong. …

Forensics as Scholarship: Testing Zarefsky's Bold Hypothesis in a Digital Age

The tables of contents from the 1915–1917 volumes of the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking reveal how the field of communications academic lineage can be traced back to the forensic debating tradition. In the U.S., that traditions practical roots were established by hundreds of contracts between universities to hold intercollegiate debates for public audiences. Later in the 20th century, the advent of organized debate tournaments turned forensics into a specialized laboratory for argumentation, where contest round practice yielded first a stock-issues model of argument, followed by multiple debate paradigms, and then a series of critical rhetorics. We envision a next evolutionary step where forensics moves to seize novel opportunities offered by the digital age to refresh its practice as a “participatory culture. “Key to this evolution is recognition of David Zarefskys insights into the relationship between argument, criticism, and judgment. We illustrate the potential of debate to model strategies of new media literacy through adaptation of his hypothesis-testing model of argument to digital contexts.

The Passion of the Christ Meets Fahrenheit 9/11 A Study in Celebrity Advocacy

Why are The Passion of the Christand Fahrenheit 9/11mentioned in the same breath when referring to the political campaigns of 2004? What role did these films play in the election debate? How did television code reception, at once expanding and disciplining, tantalizing and moralizing the public? The article examines the entwinement of entertainment, media, and politics in national debate, as the most talked about films of 2004 transmute wartime suffering into political purpose, each serving a similar function for respective Republican and Democratic campaigns and each generating controversy stirred and strangled by televisual critics. The article concludes by advocating a role for critical inquiry into celebrity advocacy—as artistic enactment, stylistic vision, and mass media promotion. Studies of the multiple dimensions of celebrity advocacy should augment significantly our contemporary discussions of deliberative democracy.

The Student Debt Bubble

The ‘student debt bubble’ is an ideograph referring to the growing imbalance between the costs of higher education and the capacity of students to shoulder increasing debt burdens. This unsustainable condition is constructed by numerous stakeholders, who have dramatically resituated risks and rewards in higher education. The resulting debt bubble has multiple outcomes, including incremental efforts for reform at the federal level, ideological speculation by neoliberal bloggers, and vituperative assaults on higher education by state and local politicians. Following Kenneth Burke, we isolate the student debt bubble as network and rhetoric of motives.

Complex Cases and Legitimation Inference: Extending the Toulmin Model to Deliberative Argument in Controversy

A warrant may be grounded in personal testimony, technical method, or public consensus. The justified choice of a field, in authorizing the warrant and providing further extension of support constitutes a legitimation inference. Complex cases evolve when there are a surplus of good reasons as potential support for a claim, and a choice must be made either to select a single ground for the claim or to advance independently valid reasons, differentially grounded, as support. Complex cases enter the realm of controversy when not all relevant grounds offer the same degree of support or point in the same direction, and a choice to select some grounds and discard others must be justified. The justification of the selection of grounds constitutes a legitimation warrant—a missing element of the Toulmin model.

Rhetoric and Communication: Alternative Worlds of Inquiry

Rhetoric and communication inquiry characterize the broader discipline of communication studies. The discipline has developed by retaining interest in questions of interaction and exchange, language and institutions, as well as publics and social change. The futures of such work include critical investigations into communication societies that are culturally diverse, technologically wired, local-cosmopolitan networks. I support Andrew Kings position that economics should play an increasingly important role in our discipline, but I urge that inquiry be extended beyond ideological critique with its melioristic ends. Communication society should be examined in its varied and specific sites of inquiry in order to create an emergent global discipline.