The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk - Softcover

McCormick, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022667777X ISBN 13: 9780226677774

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

From Plato’s contempt for “the madness of the multitude” to Kant’s lament for “the great unthinking mass,” the history of Western thought is riddled with disdain for ordinary collective life. But it was not until Kierkegaard developed the term chatter that this disdain began to focus on the ordinary communicative practices that sustain this form of human togetherness.

The Chattering Mind explores the intellectual tradition inaugurated by Kierkegaard’s work, tracing the conceptual history of everyday talk from his formative account of chatter to Heidegger’s recuperative discussion of “idle talk” to Lacan’s culminating treatment of “empty speech”—and ultimately into our digital present, where small talk on various social media platforms now yields big data for tech-savvy entrepreneurs.

In this sense, The Chattering Mind is less a history of ideas than a book in search of a usable past. It is a study of how the modern world became anxious about everyday talk, figured in terms of the intellectual elites who piqued this anxiety, and written with an eye toward recent dilemmas of digital communication and culture. By explaining how a quintessentially unproblematic form of human communication became a communication problem in itself, McCormick shows how its conceptual history is essential to our understanding of media and communication today.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Samuel McCormick is associate professor of communication studies at San Francisco State University.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022667777X
• ISBN 13: 9780226677774
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 338
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar