ABSTRACT
If Shirky and Virilio are correct, what does this mean for public deliberation in digitally networked environments privileging timeliness of response? The accelerated networked media ecology, featuring blogs, wikis, podcasts, viral videos, memes, social networking sites, and nanoblogging sites, thrives on speed. From the 24-hour news cycle hungry to fi ll time, to blogs that parse and re-parse political moments, to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram updates about who ate what when, ours is an era that thrives on information-driven events (Xenos, 2008). As opposed to the old rhetoric, which Richard Weaver (1953) characterized as spacious, the new networked rhetoric privileges timeliness. The trajectory away from the spacious oratory that Weaver (1953) traced remains suggestive: “From the position that only propositions are interesting because they alone make judgments, we are passing to a position in which only evidence is interesting because it alone is uncontaminated by propositions. In brief, interest has shifted from inference to reportage” (p. 172). The rage for reportage, represented for Weaver by Time magazine’s photojournalism, focuses on “impertinences” (p. 179) – “offi cious details” that “would only lower the general effect” of old oratory (p. 176).
