The Perfect Response | EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

A basic rhetorical principle is that pronouns like “you,” “they” and “them” will open up distance between a source and its intended receivers.

One of the more subtle effects of messages we send to others is how we “voice” them. Among other things, voicing involves the use of pronouns and and other words that affect how a receiver understands the source. A very formal message will probably make assertions or requests with reference to only the receivers of the message. For example, a memo that from the boss that says “All of you will need to budget more time this week to complete this audit” makes it clear that (1) the manager is seemingly excluding himself from most of the work and that (2) he thinks of himself as distinct from the rest of the group. The message is voiced as a directive. If the request was changed to say “All of us will need to budget more time for this work,” the social distance between the staff and the manager would be lessened.

This basic lesson of voicing is obvious but important. The pronouns ” “you,” “they,” and “them” tend to keep distance between the source and the receivers. The use of “us” and “we” do the reverse. They close the distance with others, suggesting a more inclusive group. With the example above it’s obvious that a better style of management is exemplified in the second example. Top-down leadership using terms of exclusivity is more likely to feed all kinds of organizational resentments.

The constant use of “I” can also become a particular irritant because it signals a person who appears to be stuck in a self-referential box. Suspect someone of being a narcissist? Count the “I”s in a segment of their everyday speech.

It’s not unusual for advocates to go off the rails, missing their audience’s sensitivities to whether they seem to think of themselves as part of the same community.

A famous case of a message unraveling because it was given in the wrong voice happened when independent Presidential candidate Ross Perot was invited to address the NAACP in 1992. The group’s annual meeting is one of the nation’s important venues for a candidate. And Perot thought he had a winning message. His speech sought to build solidarity by referencing his own poverty as a youth growing up in Texas, but Perot kept using the wrong pronoun. He kept talking about “you folks:” “Now I don’t have to tell you who gets hurt first” in hard times, he began. “”You people do; your people do.” Amid a string of “I”s he kept digging himself into a deeper hole of alienation. Finally someone in the back of the all shouted “Correct it!,” literally asking Perot to place himself inside the same social space with his fellow human beings. But he remained clueless to the end. Headlines the next day noted that the candidate “Laid an Egg.” Nothing of substance he said made any difference after his audience registered the simple but consequential mistake of misplaced pronouns. It was not the language itself that was the problem. Rather, it was that it signaled an embedded bias that told his audience that he saw them as a different tribe.

**_{“Internet Research Agency,” St. Petersburg Russia}**

The current unease in the politics of Western nations owes a lot to the disruptive effects of social media contagion, seen in the rise of the yellow jackets of France, avid Brexiters in the United Kingdom, and America’s MAGA enthusiasts, who accept the trashing of American political traditions as payback for being left on the political margins.

We are on the edge of another extended presidential contest, reflected in the growing preoccupation of the national news media on possible challengers in both parties. While its natural to speculate on those who might rise to become a party’s nominee, forces in play now make this handicapping process far less predictive.

The parties once had a tighter grip on its members and it’s brighter lights who were ready to vie for the nomination. But they are now weaker and less cohesive. Leaders and rising stars within them still claim attention, but steering the nomination is more difficult. The difference is the growth of social media. Think of a poker game with two wildcards. That can make for some surprises. Now imagine another game with eight wildcards, which would make any bet far less certain. That’s roughly the effect that media contagion can have on those who want to end up at the top of the heap. Twitter and other social media are always potential disruptors in ways that the once dominant broadcast networks were not.

To be sure, those of us who have studied presidential politics used to be cheered by the decline of the “smoke filled room” of ‘pols’ who could make private deals well out of sight of the the public side of a campaign. For example, John F. Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, famously helped pave the way for the nomination of his son. The elder Kennedy and his friends had the power to make it happen. Now, not only are there no back rooms with true power-brokers, there is no process-centered roadmap that will help predict how the finalists in this long struggle for party dominance will fare. Once they ‘surface’ as candidates they will hit a maw of social media forces not easily controlled by anyone. The serendipitous nature of peer to peer connection is now a driverless car, leaving a lot up in the air in terms of where a candidate will end up. Add in the seemingly endless desire of Russian state actors who can sabotage campaigns with misinformation or inflammatory rhetoric. The point is that the effects of these forces cannot be predicted in advance. It is in the nature of internet contagion that private citizens and others blending with them will create campaign roadblocks no more predictable than a California mudslide. The best we can do is know that some of these narratives will weaken strong contenders, while leaving others mostly untouched.

This was partly the fate of the Clinton campaign in 2016. A range of factors contributed to her defeat: Wikileaks “dumps” of private emails, Trump campaign contacts with Russians eager to see her lose, and a hefty dose of nativist appeals. Trump himself has tried to quell astounding but credible speculation that he is a willing or unwilling “Russian asset.” Yet in other ways the fate of his administration is also to be determined by the social media cards that remain to be dealt.

We cannot predict whose identities and fantasies might be triggered by factual or fabricated narratives.

This defeat of even minimal predictability owes much to the gap between what might be called a “strategic/rhetorical” model of politics and a new and more fluid model of how information now enters the public sphere. The first assumes an understanding of the rules and key audiences that must be satisfied. The second blurs the idea of “audiences” altogether. At this stage and for the immediate future, we cannot know whose identities and fantasies might be triggered by factual or fabricated narratives from unvetted sources. The best we can know is that when they arise, the “viable candidate” of today may suddenly look unelectable.

In short, the politics of Western nations is now shaped by the disruptive power of social media contagion, seen in the yellow jackets of France, avid Brexiters in the United Kingdom, and America’s MAGA enthusiasts.