You could also say that Clinton simply switched audiences, from judgmental Yankees to people more amenable to his Bubba charm. The campaign did that for him. Where the primaries went, so did he, and after New Hampshire, they went south. Switching audiences can turn an unpersuadable moment into a persuadable one. Marketers spend millions to find susceptible audiences open to these moments.
Unfortunately, you and I don’t always have that luxury. If one’s lover is not in the mood, one generally should not seek a more amenable audience next door. Generally, you have to take the audience you are given, and if you want to persuade them, you usually need to wait for the right occasion. But not always. Kairos is the art of seizing the occasion, and timing is only half of an occasion. And the other half? The medium. That’s the next chapter.
The Tools
One of the great masters of kairos is Dolly Parton. This is one secret to how she remains beloved by people on the political left and right, as well as evangelicals and members of the LGBTQ community. She chose the perfect moment, 1980, to appear in the feminist movie 9 to 5 and to write its theme song. Any earlier and she would have turned off a great many of her fans; any later and the message wouldn’t have made such a difference. Two decades later, she appeared at a celebration of the movie with her co-stars, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. While Fonda and Tomlin had harsh words for Donald Trump, Dolly Parton urged us all to pray for the president. When asked why she didn’t voice an opinion of the man, she said she probably would at some point: “I have a great sense of timing.” One of the great rhetors of our age.
While there’s only one Dolly Parton, we can all polish our kairos skills. Just to make sure we have it all down:
Changing circumstances or moods often signal a persuadable moment.
You can create a persuadable moment by changing or pinpointing your audience.
24. Use the Right Medium
THE JUMBOTRON BLUNDER
How the right media can help your messages
If you want a symbolic gesture, don’t burn the flag, wash it.
—NORMAN THOMAS
Most men, but not all, know that it is a bad idea to propose marriage at a baseball game. It takes a strange mix of shyness and exhibitionism to ask a woman to marry you via JumboTron. If your proposal requires any persuasion, you may find yourself standing embarrassed in front of thousands of highly entertained fans. In short, you have chosen the wrong medium. The medium can make or break a persuasive moment. Say the right thing at the right time over the right channel, and the world is your rhetorical oyster.
Persuasion Alert
Look at my logos strategy here. I use extreme examples to prove my conclusion: the right medium is crucial to your kairos. Half of them are personal, because experiences bolster my accessible ethos.
You know the hazards of saying the wrong thing, and of persuading at the wrong time. The medium can be just as important. A guy where I used to work speculated about the sex lives of a couple of officemates in what he thought was a private email to a coworker, and ended up sending it to the entire company by mistake. He is no longer employed with that company. Another guy I know commented enthusiastically on the breasts of a coworker in a manufacturing plant, unaware that his intercom was set to “broadcast.” He, too, is no longer with his company. Uncle Wip, host of a popular 1940s kiddie show on Philadelphia’s WIP radio, won the worst kind of immortality when he said, thinking he was off the air at the end of a program, “That ought to hold the little bastards.” And then there was Donald Trump’s leaked “locker room talk” in a trailer.
In each case, the person in question performed in front of an unintended, if often appreciative, audience. This is nothing new. For eons, private letters have been intercepted and conversations overheard; technology now just makes it much, much easier to address the wrong crowd, or call the wrong number, or to do it at the wrong time.
Which would you use to propose marriage: Face-to-face? The silent proffer of a ring? Letter? Email? Text? Blog? TikTok? PowerPoint presentation? Skywriting? Announcement at a ball game? Brick thrown through a window? Hallmark card? (“Our marriage is sure to be beautiful. Best wishes.”)
The choice seems fairly obvious, though not to everyone, apparently. The face-to-face approach works best because it throws in all three appeals, logic, character, and emotion. Skywriting and JumboTrons just don’t convey the same pathetic appeal. And failing to show up for your own proposal certainly lacks ethos.
You should consider several factors in choosing a medium: timing, the kind of appeal (ethos, pathos, or logos), and the sort of gestures you want to make.
What’s the timing? In other words, how fast a response does your audience expect? And how long should the message last? Donald Trump might have been happier if the people doing the sound check on his remote mike hadn’t archived the tape.
Which combination of ethos, pathos, and logos would persuade best? Each medium favors one appeal over the others.
What gestures will help your appeal? I mean “gestures” both literally and figuratively. In rhetoric, gestures can constitute everything from a shrug to a bonus check. A smile, a protest march, the boss’s game attempt to wear a Hawaiian shirt on casual Friday, the subtler kinds of body language—all count as gestures. Rhetoricians went nuts over them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thanks to the “elocution movement.” The old social structures were breaking down, and one’s birth was becoming less of a prerequisite for aristocracy. Education could help earn a place in the gentry. But one also needed decorum—the manners and mannerisms of a gentleman or a lady. You can imagine the demand for books that taught how to act like gentlefolk. A whole category of bestsellers sprang up around the teaching of elocution, which combined voice and gesture. In 1829 a speech instructor at Harvard even made himself notorious by teaching “exploding” vowels and devising a bamboo sphere for use in practicing gestures. The sphere tortured students until it was hung from a barber pole in Harvard Yard. Nonetheless, publishers were rapidly putting out books with engravings that showed gestures to convey every possible emotion.
Sensing Persuasion
What does all this have to do with the medium you choose for your message? Everything. Each sense has its own persuasive quality, and the medium using that sense carries the same sort of persuasion.
Sound is the most rational sense in regard to the spoken voice (though a voice can convey a lot of ethos). When the sound is music, pathos takes over.
Smell is the most pathetic. A bit of perfume, a whiff of gunpowder, or the stench of a diaper can trigger a strong emotional response.
Sight leans toward the pathetic, because we tend to believe what we see—and as Aristotle said, what we believe determines how we feel. But sight becomes almost purely logical when it encounters type on a page.
Touch is pathos, of course. That’s literally what we feel.
Taste is pathos again, naturally.
Isn’t it interesting that the spoken voice should be a rational medium? Television confuses things, because images trump sound; that makes TV lean toward the pathetic. Rhetoric naturally favors the logical approach; that’s why persuaders try to convey vivid imagery, for just as sight beats sound, pathos tends to trump logos. Radio reporters were on the front lines throughout the Vietnam War, but who remembers them? It was TV that ended that war—emotionally.
Okay, but what about reading type? That involves sight, doesn’t it? No. Well, yes, it does involve the eyes, but the act of reading is more sound than sight—you receive voices, not mere type.
TRY THIS WHEN YOU SELL A HOUSE
A Realtor will tell you to bake bread or put a few cinnamon sticks in a warm oven before an open house. This isn’t to cover bad odors; it’s a pathetic gesture that takes advantage of the smell receptors’ proximity to the region of your brai
n dedicated to memory. Baking smells give potential buyers the comfortable feeling they had when they were kids—or think they had.
If you want your kairos to work properly, you need to know the rhetorical qualities of each medium. Take email, for instance. As a medium of type, it conveys logos for the most part, with a bit of ethos. This makes it very bad for expressing an emotion. Because your audience can’t see your face or hear your voice, your feeling becomes disembodied. If you want to express any empathy whatsoever, therefore, you should avoid email. RadioShack executives seemed ignorant of this simple rule when the company fired four hundred workers by email. The message read, in part: “The workforce reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.” The medium—combined with the no-one’s-behind-this use of the passive voice—made it seem as if the workers were being fired by a RadioShack robot. Which was kind of cool in a way, except to the people losing their jobs.
Classic Hits
THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN POPULAR ON THE SUBWAY: The Greeks and Romans all read aloud, even when they were alone. It didn’t occur to them to read silently. Words on a page were like a recording; the reader’s job was to play it back in his own voice. A group of readers must have sounded like a classroom of first-graders. No wonder they had a love-hate relationship with writing.
On the other hand, emotions can get out of control when they stray beyond the feelings of the moment. Think of the weird timing of email, both instantaneous and potentially permanent. A message stays angry, sitting there like a bomb in your audience’s in-box, long after you have calmed down. Email humor can be tricky for the same reason. The secret of comedy is timing, right? Emails don’t have any particular timing. And remember the problem of the unintended audience? (If you have any questions about that, ask Hillary Clinton.)
TRY THIS IN YOUR OFFICE EMAILS
Want to gain a respectable ethos through your notes? Make them shorter when you address people at your level or below. Don’t get too brief when you manage up, though. Higher-ups in a company write shorter emails, implying that they don’t have to justify their choices. (God’s emails would be very, very short, in the nature of “Cut it out.”)
In fact, you should avoid emailing any message that smacks of pathos. Why do you suppose most people choose not to pray over email? They may receive prayers, sure. But why don’t they email God for forgiveness and with a request to smite the Dallas Cowboys next Sunday? Because God lacks an Internet service provider? No. Because praying is pathos, with a little ethos mixed in, and email is mostly logos.
You might expect me to say that email is a fairly poor way of showing gestures as well. But if you see it in the broadest, rhetorical sense, the length of your note is a form of gesture. The longer the note, the more logos it conveys. The shorter the note, the more its flavor becomes ethos. As Cicero noted, gestures help determine your decorum. The more understated the gesture, the higher your apparent position in society. This notion is by no means out of date, as business emails prove.
You would think that texting would work the same way, but it doesn’t, for two reasons: instantaneousness and ephemerality. A text is even more instantaneous than an email, and it has very little to do with what the civilized world knows as “writing.” Plus, unless you’re on an FBI watch list, the instant message is ephemeral. It has the life span (and intellectual content) of a moderate belch. Yet the medium of a text message is type. The text can’t be much of a pathos medium, or there would be no need for those weird, mimelike frowny-face emoticons or obnoxious acronyms such as “LOL.” Instead of actual laughing, it’s a text message of laughing—or, worse, a laughing GIF. So, absent logos and pathos, what does texting have left? Ethos. All ethos, all the time. Texting is mostly about identity. It takes place almost entirely in the present tense, and its language is packed with code grooming. A text message is to written text what a walkie-talkie message is to an oration. In fact, the texting medium is a walkie-talkie, for all rhetorical purposes—rapid-fire, used merely to locate people and keep in contact, and spoken mainly in code, IMHO (in my humble opinion). You can use it to find out where someone is or whether he is ready for lunch. But the most ardent texters are teenagers, who live for demonstrative rhetoric—signaling who’s in and who’s out of the tribe.
Go ahead and laugh at teenagers, but perhaps the rest of us could use more of this friendly gesturing. Adults have lost something since Victorian times, when gentlefolk would come calling and leave their cards—messages that usually consisted of nothing but their own names. I can’t think of a modern parallel, except for the just-touching-base voicemail…and the adolescent’s texting.
TRY THIS WITH YOUR KIDS
Insist that your children friend you on Facebook, and subscribe to their Instagram pages. When you travel, text them. These connections give kids a sense that you’re there. My own children seemed to like it.
TRY THIS WHEN YOU WANT TO SELL SOMETHING
To test a new product, set up a blog and link it to appropriate pages on Wikipedia. It lets you pull together a community of a few hundred subscribers in as little as several weeks. You can send them your product or ask for suggestions in marketing it. I did this with my own rhetoric blog, and had a dedicated community of thousands of subscribers who gave me advice for my book.
The instantaneous quality of the Internet explains why it has not turned out to be the great cauldron of democracy its inventors and Al Gore had hoped it would be. If any aspect of the Web would foster democracy, you would think that the blogosphere, an egalitarian universe of voices, would be at the very heart of the movement. But like the instant message, the blog does little more than bring together extremely like-minded people. Whether it’s the daily lament of a tragically pimpled sixteen-year-old or the dishings of network journalists, a Web log is a diary. It is not like a ship log, which is a permanent record of the ship’s voyages. A blog serves mostly as an ephemeral reflection of the events in a person’s life, profession, or field of interest. Blogs do offer a democratic opportunity to get attention through sheer writing talent; Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog made him Washington’s top pundit when he was in his early twenties. But few blogs contribute much to deliberative discourse; their main purpose is bonding, not choices. Even Allvoices.com, a site dedicated to encouraging amateur pundits, is dominated by voices on the left, and the more popular bloggers attract like-minded commenters.
Twitter? That’s blogging, only shorter. Podcast? A blog with higher production values.
As a committed blogger myself, I learned the medium’s demonstrative qualities the hard way. On Figarospeech.com I take something that somebody said in politics, sports, or entertainment and parse it as a figure of speech, revealing the rhetorical tricks and pratfalls. I thought that, like this book, the blog would teach the many wonders of rhetoric that I was learning. And I like to think that it does, a little. But my fellow “figarists,” as I call them, like to think of themselves as a community. In response to one particularly innocuous entry, one subscriber thanked me for “fighting the good fight.” This is demonstrative language par excellence, and it helps explain why the Internet has failed to bring everyone together under its big, friendly, blogospheric roof.
The Logical Telephone
So much for the World Wide tribal Web. Let’s look at the more traditional media. Take the phone call. In earlier eras, voice was the dominant way people communicated; hearing is the most logocentric sense. This is why the conference call is such a rational exercise—and why businesspeople spend billions to avoid them by hopping on airplanes. If human communication were completely logical, the major airlines would be out of business. The telephone limits rhetoric to just one appeal, logos. Humans need doses of ethos and pathos to form teams and sustain relationships.
TRY THIS WITH A MEETING
If you don’t want anyone to feel like an outsider, avoid meeting in a conference room unl
ess everyone can attend in person. Otherwise, set up a conference call where each individual phones in. That keeps the meeting on solidly logical ground. Absent callers can sense the significant looks people shoot one another, and might feel they’re being excluded from the tribe.
Okay, so why do telecoms sell mobile phones with such pathetic ads—the young mother who holds the phone up to the newborn so Grandma can hear it? Because a picture of an Aristotelian debate wouldn’t sell telephones. Besides, ads about telephones do not use phones as their medium. They use TV, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet—media that mix all three appeals, with a heavy emphasis on pathos (Grandma) and ethos (gorgeous movie star fondling cellphone).
Is the phone really that rational a medium? The notion stretches credulity when you see a teenager call a friend. Indeed, any medium can be used for ethos—as a means of touching base. Have you ever observed a girl or boy call up their first love? The surprising part is not what they say to each other; it’s the long silences when the couple says nothing at all. The phone call is a connection, not a conversation—not really a call at all, but a different medium altogether, an electronic connection. This explains why texting has largely replaced phoning for that purpose: because the Internet lets adolescents wire up with a network, not just one person. And it explains the way young lovers Skype each other. Talk about ethos and gesturing: no talking necessary! One long, moony stare says it all. The phone call still counts as one of the most rational media—if the phone is used to make an actual call, with people actually talking and not staring.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 34