Forensics as Scholarship: Testing Zarefsky's Bold Hypothesis in a Digital Age

The tables of contents from the 1915–1917 volumes of the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking reveal how the field of communication's academic lineage can be traced back to the forensic debating tradition. In the U.S., that tradition's practical roots were established by hundreds of contracts between universities to hold intercollegiate debates for public audiences. Later in the 20th century, the advent of organized debate tournaments turned forensics into a specialized laboratory for argumentation, where contest round practice yielded first a stock-issues model of argument, followed by multiple debate paradigms, and then a series of critical rhetorics. We envision a next evolutionary step where forensics moves to seize novel opportunities offered by the digital age to refresh its practice as a “participatory culture. “Key to this evolution is recognition of David Zarefsky's insights into the relationship between argument, criticism, and judgment. We illustrate the potential of debate to model strategies of new media literacy through adaptation of his hypothesis-testing model of argument to digital contexts