The Argument Culture

In The Argument Culture, Deborah Tannen describes our adversarial society in debates and dialogues. Tannen discusses our culture?s style of seeing issues, questions, and conflicts as having two sides that battle each other for one goal, victory. She says that not only does this argument culture or culture of critique we live in make life more challenging and alienating, it also reduces the amount of information made available to viewers or information seekers. Tannen …

…just give up confrontations, but to diversify because we need more than one path to the goal that everyone seeks. The Argument Culture is an intelligent exploration of challenges, issues and contradictions in our everyday lives. Using debate and dialogues as her examples, Tannen?s take home message is simply that not every interaction should be adversarial and recognizing this can get us away from the catfight mentality and closer to actual exchange of information.