One of the advertised highlights of last year's International Communication Association conference, which I attended, was the keynote lecture by communication studies warhorse Jürgen Habermas. For most of us in the audience, this was an only moderately enjoyable experience, however - unfortunately, the acoustics of the plenary hall combined with Habermas's accent and pronounced lisp meant that much of the lecture was very difficult to understand, even in spite (?) of the Powerpoint slides (photos of some of which I included in my blog post at the time).