ABSTRACT
In “A Call for Comity,” in her co-edited Beyond Postprocess and Postmodernism: Essays on The Spaciousness of Rhetoric, Theresa Enos examines the concept of “comity,” “the attitude and ethos that distinguish the politics of a public society” located in the space between the individual and the state (135). Her concern focuses, at least in part, on the forces that in a culture of argument-reverberating across road, mass media, and blogosphere alike-seem marshaled against civility, against the ability of people to converse together, to work together toward a common purpose, much less toward a common good. Enos identifi es three characteristics that particularly contribute to what she perceives as a demise of comity:
1. the compression of time brought about through mass media and digital technologies like email and instant messaging;
2. changes in our sense of space, brought on in part through digital technologies; and
3. a loss of self-refl exiveness.
