Introduction to Special Issue: Public Argument/digital Media

What is the fate of public argument in an era of digital media? It is all too easy to follow Stephen Colbert's lead and simply suggest that "truthiness" reigns given that public argument often appears dominated by gut reactions, under-scrutinized evidence, lazy claim comparisons, and unjustified warrants. Truthiness is found in the politician who ignores evidence in favor of ideological predispositions, in the undergraduate who quotes from satirical news websites without recognizing the satire, and in the citizen who follows only one talking head on the nightly cable news networks. The rise of truthiness is inextricably connected to the proliferation of media. No longer does the newspaper or broadcast television program set a common agenda for the nation, with ostensibly reliable opinion leaders filtering through information before publication of the "news" (Bennett and Manheim, 2006). Instead, as Cass Sunstein (2002, 2007, 2009) has repeatedly warned, citizens living in a time of information abundance set up filters to winnow down the data that endlessly streams toward their eyes and ears. These filters often cohere with their already established viewpoints, creating echo chambers of the like-minded that polarize over time. People literally live in different--to coin a term--factiverses. Arguers can find support for almost any argument by searching the vast intercast of the internet. It is a safe bet that if you can think it, it has been published on some digital network. A common, and warranted, impulse for many argumentation scholars is to bemoan this phenomenon because it undermines many of the assumptions of liberal public argument that have constituted the intellectual infrastructure of modernity. Argumentative norms, like listening to both sides of an issue before forming an opinion, making transparent the moves from evidence to warrants and claims, and maintaining civil relations with co-arguers, often do not appear to prevail in environments mediated by digital technologies. Another story might be told, however, that would shift the frame from a declinist narrative of public argument to a more hopeful one. Such a competing story would emphasize not the decline of the modernist norms of argumentation, but the spread and even sophistication of argument practices in a networked era. Much of what happens in the blogosphere, on social networking sites, through microblogging, via video-sharing sites, and by means of discussion forums is the production and criticism of argumentation. Though citizens have been producing and criticizing argument outside the purview of print and electronic media for centuries, networked digital media provide new opportunities for them to do so with an unprecedented degree of publicity and interconnectivity. The face-to-face conversation that used to occur over the backyard fence is now supplemented by many-to-many contexts of communication; making these once limited-circulation arguments public through digital media now invites scores of interlocutors to weigh in. Disagreements that used to be mediated orally can now be conducted hypertextually, with links to premises and evidence embedded in the text of the argument itself. These emergent networked argument practices deserve further critical scrutiny and theorization as scholars grapple with how new forms of mediation alter the norms and conduct of argumentation. As the fora for public argument have expanded, the language of argumentation has--at least informally--permeated a wider variety of social contexts. It is no longer uncommon to see requests for evidence on threaded discussions, criticisms of argument structures on blogs, or exchanges of perspective in comments sections. Such diffusion provides an enormous opening for scholars of public argument to describe, analyze, and critique argumentation practices that occur in digitally networked environments. In some cases, traditional argumentation tools can help us interpret public argument mediated through new digital technologies, but in other cases scholars will be called upon to articulate new concepts, theories, and heuristics to better analyze digitally networked arguments. …