Professor G. Thomas Goodnight is a distinguished scholar and philosopher, renowned for his research on argumentation in the public sphere. Recently, he has devoted himself to developing the energy communication as a subfield. In this academic interview, Goodnight first explains what energy communication is and why it is important to our field. He then turns to emerging topics such as artificial intelligence, smart cities, and the Belt and Road's energy diplomacy to share his latest insights on the energy issue in the digital communication age, as well as the argumentation, differences, dissensus, and their productive nature in the global transition.

In 2023, artificial intelligence was announced as a “game changer”—marking a rapid revolution in thinking technologies. A global debate began to emerge. By conducting a discourse analysis of 2023 US congressional testimonies and AI manifestos, we aim to map the emergence of debates over the start-up of a global governance controversy. Qualitative topical identification and semantic network analysis are deployed to identify the primary stakeholders and their contesting arguments. The resulting polylog exhibits sharp divisions among multiple, distinct pro-tech and pro-rights groups. Pro-tech stakeholders emphasize innovation and economic benefits, while pro-rights groups prioritize human rights and safety. Our linguistic and semantic network analyses provide micro-level insights into the polylogue entanglements of ethics and governance. The analysis of US AI advocacy discourse furnishes a baseline of contestation from which the ongoing development of the complex arguments of AI policies can be identified and evaluated.

Modern thinkers long have been troubled by everyday talk. For example, one nineteenth-century Tory critic observes, “General small-talk” is any exchange “in mixed society, where men and women, young and old, wise and foolish, are all mingled together.” However available the occasion or obvious the topics, chatting is easy for the talented but awkward for the ungifted. On the other hand, “special, or professional small talk” is an exchange of words between persons of “the same mode of life, as between two apothecaries, two dissenters, two lawyers, two beggars, two reviewers, two butlers, two statements, two thieves, &c.&c.&c.; in short all conversations which are tinctured with the art, craft, mystery, occupation, or habits of the interlocutors” (Campbell et al. 1823). For those who can mingle, chat blossoms. For others, social occasions are always awkward, even dreaded. The traditional, elevated, polite arts of conversation were passing in the entrepreneurial, vernacular, and expert exchanges of urban living in the industrial, nationalizing nineteenth century. Newspapers headlined events, published speeches, and churned the talk of the town. Samuel McCormick’s excellent work beckons us to consider such things anew and attend: “The range of modernity’s chattering mind” (298).The Chattering Mind visits distinctions made between wasteful chatter and three sophisticated excurses. With care, he recounts “Kierkegaard’s existentialist critique of chatter, Heidegger’s phenomenological account of idle talk, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic treatment of empty speech” (297–98). These careful interpretations percolate the book’s informed call to reconsider the standing of subjectivities in an “algorithmic era, where small talk now doubles as a resource for bit data, and big data as the lynchpin of our digital selves” (295). Thus, McCormick constructs “a study of how the modern world became anxious” because “many of the cultural anxieties that piqued their interest continue to inform individual and collective life in the digital age” (299). Chatter, idle talk, and empty speech are concepts embedded, respectively, in Kierkegaard’s subjective objecting, Heidegger’s ontological rhetoric, and Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic discourses of analysis.“Every day talk” is set within the history leading from nineteenth-century modernity to twentieth-century mass society. The “everyday” initially appears “in person and in print, among ordinary citizens and educated elites, with varying degrees of deliberateness and unawareness” (2–3). The industrial revolution paralleled development of the “ordinary, habitual, and frequently recursive kind of communicating that occurs in private and public setting alike” (4). Unsettled by varieties of uninformed talk of their day, McCormick’s philosophers, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan, are nervous about the circulations of the masses and so distressed about the “gossip, babble, mumbling, and nonsense” that appear “especially pervasive” (4). These writers, McCormick observes, found a “motivational ingredient that has since become endemic to life in the digital age” (5). Yet, in the end “chatter, idle talk, and empty speech were neither means-turned-ends like phatic communion nor means-to-ends like political talk but, instead means without end like nothing they had seen before” (5). Ongoing, talk for talk’s sake manifested the worthy value of keeping flows of subjectivity streaming.The Chattering Mind builds a position in three parts with the conclusion following on. Each reads a philosopher in the contexts of the production of his discourse. Philosophical arguments are attuned to the reader’s understanding of “a conceptual history” that works with philological inquiry, the exposition of analytical positions, and the questioning of alternative views of public and crowd. McCormick unspools the dramas expressed by each philosopher who was irritated yet inspired by the contretemps-with a barber, rivals, officials, and town folk.Part I on Kierkegaard presents a grating event in which the Either/Or thinker observed, critiqued, and rebutted snak (“chatter”). Kierkegaard’s subjective-turn was initially occasioned by a dispute in the Copenhagen Post, where the naming of his own article as “amusement” unsettled him enough to differentiate his considered claims from “noise, wind, babbling” and the like. McCormick moves adroitly to analyze a source mentioned in Kierkegaard’s repost: The Talkative Barber. The chatterbox yaks and clips; so, repetition, intimacy, and banality fuse. The comedy discloses absent subjectivity through its and-another-thing, partner-less conversing. Ludvig Holberg’s one-act comedy was written in the early 1720s about excessive, thoughtless running talk that turns against the speaker himself. Like the Barber’s wagging tongue and moving jaw, chatting goes on without (a means to an) end.Part II unites Heidegger’s early lectures on rhetoric to his later publications and position in Being and Time. Aletheia and pseudos are illustrated in a model where deception, dissimulation, and distraction are equated with Sophists (Gorgias) and social figures of the Braggart, Stooge, and Babbler. Truth or aletheia reaches into pure perception, disclosive knowledge, the thinking through of the Theorist, Philosopher, and Dialectician. Speech and counterspeech is the domain of the orator, a higher form of bios politikos.Part III initiates an intricate, detailed response to Lacan’s reading of “the dream of Irma’s injection,” an initial episode that constituted a launch platform for Freud’s groundbreaking The Interpretation of Dreams. McCormick carefully explicates Lacan’s criticism of Freud and the latter’s reinterpretation of psychoanalysis. McCormick points to facts and associations unpursued by Lacan and advances the observation that “the resistive, egocentric practice of empty speech is, in fact, an opportunity structure for its opposite, a transformative mode of discourse he fittingly calls ‘full speech’ (parole pleine)” (8).The collapse of distinctions between (elite reading) publics and (peopled) crowds comprises a central decentering argument. Chattering complicates. Lacan works through Freud’s interpretations of Irma’s dream together with his own search for colleague confirmations of his analysis of her lingering illness. Otto’s dirty syringe appears, too. Lacan shows these episodes to be a split-collapse of Freud’s unified (narcissist) ego. Likewise, McCormick takes us to Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 5:1–30) where a moving hand burns writing onto the wall. With no decipherable meaning to the king or guests, the writing becomes interpreted by Daniel the prophet, who is mocked and ridiculed; yet, the message comes to completion overnight, with finality. Divine irony appears at hand. Thus, the composing ego is decomposed either at a health episode or at a banquet. In each case existence is at once “numbered, weighed and divided” (231). The costs of the ever-coding, perplexing self are expensive. “Freud’s acephalic, unconscious self interrupts the rambling dialogue of his peers to deliver a cryptic text addressed to us” (237). Yet in his turn to colleague confirmation, he joins the crowd (two colleagues combined with “nemo” as polycephalic being). Thus begins the pivot toward individual as crowd and public. Lacan’s master interpretative formulation of “being towards death” is not received as unalloyed wisdom by McCormick. “Like Daniel—conveyor of godly visions, interpreter of kingly dreams, master of all conjurers, diviners, astrologers and wise men—Lacan presents himself as the exclusive interpreter of this cryptic text” (237). Indeed, Lacan’s paraphrastic play wakes us from the sleeping to daylight’s assortments of te deums.Together sections 1 through 3 provide a powerful conceptualization of thinking and talking that recalls how the grounds are set for the contemporary “individual” of self and other. Everyday talk is turned from a marginal concept to a central puzzle. “As [Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan] saw it, ordinary language use was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity” (8). Everyday talk “poses the challenge of attunement itself” (9).The “First and Final Words” (section 3) moves the discussion of chatter beyond Lacan and into challenges of communication to actors in what has been named network society. Le Bon, Tarde, and LaTour are assembled, and McCormick objects to twentieth-century thinkers’ distinctions between the crowd and the public, for each fuses (through talk) with the other, and it is in conversation (however apparently unproductive) that the important work of communication and subjectivity reprise. Thus, he observes that “the network revolution of late-modernity, which has increasingly transformed small talk into big data” is “uniquely poised to embrace, advance, and even radicalize” techniques of communicative practices, understood as “techniques of self-cultivation” (11, 293). Networked individuals do revolutionize, even though waves of message-generating techniques promote, if not induce and trigger, messages that troll, swat, sh*tpost, frape, out, grief, and catfish classmates, friends, and strangers (Leader in Me 2019). Well-intentioned internet off-ramps are available to those who have mastered caveat emptor. McCormick’s recollection of modern thinkers, their contexts, concerns, and analytical argument show how reflective appreciation and criticism of everyday talk uncovers “individuating potential” for network society. He invests hope in youth resistance, even as young people show disturbing rates of anxiety and loneliness. Particularly with COVID-19, renewing virtual ties has become necessary to, rather than a supplement for, the accomplishment of the everyday.The Chattering Mind animates a “conceptual history” of human science that brings forth a “usable” and contingent present. In the conclusion, McCormick’s “mind” artfully nudges communication onto more complex, circumspect, and ambivalent nests of inquiry. To communicate is to share, he shows, but it is also to contaminate (285). “We see a transhistorical assemblage of communicative practices and cross-hatched identities that are at once individual and collective, rational and irrational, normative and pathological—and thus just as likely to thrive in reading publics comprised of educated elites as they are to flourish in revolutionary crowds made up of lay citizens. Such is the range of modernity’s chattering mind,” he writes (298).To be sure, the Anglo-American communication field is no stranger to the everyday. But, across the twentieth century, it preferred pragmatic theories, robust engineering, and means-ends accounting. Group discussion and vernacular address, interpersonal and organizational success furnish objects of inquiry for democratized, industrial, electronics society. The goal of increasing skills for success furnishes a mission for communication studies. Critical rhetorical theories, too, contribute by exposing inefficient prejudices and hardened traditions. Communication in this vein is a resource to be mined incessantly by centers confederating social sciences and humanities methods. Alternatively, the modern human sciences emphasize interdisciplinary work among many fields such as cognition, philosophy, history, and anthropology as well as biology, biochemistry, and folklore. Mass communication and mass society furnished objects of concern for European researchers brokering individual, national, and mass relations. McCormick’s idea of a “a new form of networked individualism” (294) asks that the field reimagine communication in forms wider than expressions with phatic meaning or strategic vectors of political power.In beautifully written and deeply thoughtful reconstructions, McCormick orchestrates the philosophy of communication into resonances with the conceptual play of the human sciences. He speaks to hearing with attention and “seeing the world around us—a way of seeing well-attuned to what Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan all understood as the challenge of attunement itself” (9). And the resonance is important. As these thinkers “were all careful to insist, everyday talk is also the condition of possibility for alternate, more resolved ways of speaking, thinking, and being with others” (8). The modes of resistance and acts of transformation that McCormick discovers are powerful. But, coded “snake oil” and the spread of soothing “technobabble” conceal genuinely disturbing algorithmic carving, rendering and distribution of “fully traceable” communications. The networked “individual” seeks to “have” (a profile) rather than to “be” (a self), McCormick suggests (296). Whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent releases of Meta (a.k.a Facebook) internal memos shows that communication scientists who work for a Black Box platform are entangled by “Flat-Earth” modeling that energizes a metrics-driven, message-commodity information society (Allyn 2021). Trace and transparency fail to link. Haugen points out that dissimilar entities are linked by profit-maximizing processes at the micro (anorexia promotion), meso (antidemocracy controls removed), and macro (genocide in Myanmar and Ethiopia) levels. The twenty-first-century “chattering mind” has its work cut out, AI notwithstanding. Sam McCormick’s inquiry on communication and its resonance with the human sciences offers an auspicious launch for inquiries into the entanglements of communication, subjectivity, and the Möbius geometries of data-fueled chat forms. We need to keep in mind that “everyday talk was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity” (292–293).

A distinguished cognitive scientist, George Lakoff, called attention to the relation between brain and mind in reading the political ideologies of the American right and left at the beginning decades of the twenty-first century. Public policy argument, institutional logics, and political debate are well-known practices. Practical or prudential thinking weighs evidence-based claims. The so-called "culture war," however, calls attention to efforts to attract and sustain followings. Cultural arguments cultivate and disrupt norms of security and opportunity. The Fourth of July is a ritual moment of American identities. President Trump had expressed desires in 2018 for a full blown military parade, the kind that affirms power in stylish grandeur, as seen in Paris or Moscow. He was thwarted by cost and risk objections. In 2019, he willed the celebration into being. Rather than resolve the truth of an inference, a tropical contestation cascades with variations that bid to follow, energize, and enrich the language game.

The cybersphere constitutes a global disagreement space where the contested, ongoing ties that link states and the internet come into being. In this paper, a critique of sovereignty and political economy is offered to evaluate contemporary controversies concerning authority, independence, regulation, and access to communications as matters of relationality, materiality, and disagreement. We review China's promotion of cyber sovereignty as a complicating episode that reflects the development stresses of the sphere. China wishes to establish guardrails for the practices of multipolar global digital capitalism; yet, it has ushered in a variety of internet-related global issues, including in security, privacy, material well-being, developmental justice, and planetary futures. These complex aims invite and expand the dialectical spaces animating the cybersphere.

The rates of environmental degradation and climate change accelerate and challenge taken-for-granted practices of living across the planet. China’s recent “smogpocalypse” illustrates how disruptive ecoevents necessitate complex, urgent alternatives and exchange. In this essay, we propose and analyze China’s Green Public Culture in terms of its players, networks, media, action, strategy, discourses, and cultural norm. The divergent communication activities of 21st-century green public culture in China are assembled as network pragmatics that cultivate experience, connect practices, tie alliances, express differences, and circulate controversy. Thus, we identify distinctive, emerging networks of cooperation and contestation, the vectors of dissensus that bid to generate and shape resources requisite for living in the Anthropocene.

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.

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 King's 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.

We develop a model of rhetorical legitimation that specifies the communicative and cognitive structure underlying the maintenance and change of institutions. To do so we draw on Toulmin (1958) and his idea that social actors can use two structurally distinct forms of rhetoric: intrafield rhetoric and interfield rhetoric. We use this distinction to develop and advance novel arguments about the role of rhetoric in legitimation processes. Specifically, we theorize how the use of intrafield and interfield rhetoric shapes and reflects social actors' assumptions of legitimacy at two different levels. We then theorize how the use of intrafield rhetoric relates more to institutional maintenance, whereas the use of interfield rhetoric relates more to institutional change.

Gabrielle Giffords survived, recovered, and returned to public life after being badly wounded by an assassination attempt on January 8, 2011. During this extended ordeal, the Arizona representative mobilized lyric, dramatic, and oratorical resources into a singular, untimely rhetoric. I contend that she invoked the cultural resources of Polyhymnia—a classical figure reminding us of the ingenious, contingent resourcefulness among the symbolic arts—to recover her public agency in a time of deep incivility and public violence. In this essay, I find Giffords’s rhetoric, including her appearances, speeches, interviews, testimony, and editorials from 2011 through 2013, to comprise acts of civil courage.

The practices of architecture and rhetoric have been closely entwined since antiquity. University of Chicago philosopher Richard McKeon mobilized this conceit to identify architectonic rhetoric as giving rise to the communication arts. State of the art communication practices would construct a pluralistic, global world for the twentieth century. The contemporary digital revolution has transferred the communication arts into information control systems through polytechtonic rhetorics. This essay calls for critique where communication is at issue for a control society.

From early modernity, philosophers have engaged in skeptical discussions concerning knowledge of the existence, state, and standing of other minds. The analogical move from self to other unfolds as controversy. This paper reposes the problem as an argumentation predicament and examines analogy as an opening to the study of rhetorical cognition. Rhetorical cognition is identified as a productive process coming to terms with an other through testing sustainable risk. The paper explains how self-sustaining risk is theorized by Aristotle’s virtue ethics in the polis. Moral hazard is identified as a threat to modern argument communities.

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 Habermas's 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 women's 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. …

The field of medical practice is influenced by biopolitics, an expanding domain of global controversies over health and medicine. The growth of direct-to-consumer advertising raises questions of influence upon doctor-patient communication. The study makes the case for critical inquiry to advance competent, clinical communicative practices.

The field of medical practice is influenced by biopolitics, an expanding domain of global controversies over health and medicine. The growth of direct-to-consumer advertising raises questions of influence upon doctor-patient communication. The study makes the case for critical inquiry to advance competent, clinical communicative practices.

On September 9, 2009, the President of the United States addressed a joint session of Congress on the issue of health care. The speech followed a long national debate over reforming a system with rising costs, declining coverage, and suboptimal outcomes. As is customary, U.S. presidents address Congress annually to report on the state of the union. They also gather the Congress in times of national crisis. At least since the Reagan administration, these nationally televised addresses allow audiences to view party divisions. Politicians sit in different groups. Members of the president’s party jump up and applaud during his speech, while those out of power remain seated, usually with crossed arms. Hissing and booing are not uncommon. Barack Obama’s health care address was greeted with the usual partisan jostling. Skeptical laughter surged from the Republicans when he reported that policy details have yet to be worked out. In the middle of the speech, Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted for the country to hear: “You lie!” The challenge turned out to be factually incorrect, and Wilson offered a half-hearted apology shortly afterward. Norman Ornstein reported that Wilson’s outburst “really does tell you how low we’ve sunk when it comes to common courtesy” (Friedman, 2009, para. 2). Unfortunately, virulent partisan displays in Congress are not uncommon, but according to Norman Ornstein “yelling in the middle of a speech ‘you lie,’ that’s something different” (ibid., para. 3). With conflict animating presidential campaigns, the question arises: How low can politics go?