ARGUMENTATION AND THE CYBERSPHERE G. Thomas Goodnight University of Southern California Modern studies of personal, technical and public argument feature dialogue, conversation, composition, performance and public address. Internet digital exchanges offer strings of arguments that position information from conventional contexts, but platform and simulate exchange at a distance. Internet language games generate memes. Memes fold into popular genres: the quarrel, quibble, and bickering. The generative qualities of language-games, mimesis and homology underwrite pervasive contentious genres, even while communicative activism engages dissensus. Key Terms: Internet, dissensus, memes, cybersphere, homology, genre. William Gibson author of Neuromancer (1984) coined the term “cyberspace” in a punk science fiction novel “whose hero, Case, “’jacks’ his nervous system into a ‘consensual illusion’ where the world is a computer simulation and humans live apart from bodies (Edwards 2000, 1). Science fiction was not far behind social fact. The first browser was Tim Berners-Lee’s WorldWideWeb (WWW) developed at CERN in 1989. Mark Andresson’s Mosaic, the initial graphical Web browser, followed at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana. Together, these achievements furnished a take-off point for popular electronic networks. The Internet explosion was so significant that the American Council on Learned Society reported that by 2008 “the networks are completely public in nature, and they are now thoroughly naturalized by the public (2008).” “The Internet, the World Wide Web, and their successors are evolving rapidly into a global digital network, a ‘cybersphere,’ interrelating people and their activities through robust, albeit ubiquitous, computers, networks, and intelligent hardware and software,” Daniel Atkins (2002) concludes. PEW (2015) reports that despite some gaps “the internet has become an integral part of everyday life across diverse parts of society.”