Public or Mass Communication is generally about communication between one speaker to an audience. A panel technically is part of Public or Mass Comm too, but one speaker is far more common.
Theorists treat Mass Communication as Face to Face communication with a distance, both literal and metaphorical wrt emotional and perceptual distance.
Style and substance are both important for effective mass communication, and there is no absolutely correct method - it always varies bast on the context.
That said, a few general guidelines about an effective delivery style:
Effective delivery style...
Appears "natural" and comfortable.
Varies, both in voice and physical motion. The delivery isn't monotonous.
Reinforces the message.
Demonstrates immediacy with audience.
For this, preparation, rehearsal, and effective notes are the best and only help you're going to get.
Onto effective substance.
Effective Substance is about having the right
message delivered by the right
source to the right
audience.
- Message strategies
- Use of Evidence (Supporting arguments) includes
- Factual statements, statistics, or studies
- examples or personal testimonials
- sayings or quotations (especially useful for developing immediacy or improving recall)
- Analogies or metaphors to illustrate the point in a new way.
- One-sided versus Two-sided Arguments is about whether you present only one side of an argument or present two sides of an argument and slant towards one. There are use cases for both.
- One-sided arguments are better if the audience already agrees or leans towards your side of the argument, there is't much controversy about the subject, and that the audience has a low familiarity with the issue.
- Two-sided arguments are better if the audience disagrees or leans against you, the subject is controversial, and the audience has or perceives that they have a high familiarity with an issue.
- Appeals to Positive Emotion
- Messages meant to arouse good feelings, like amusement (from humor), sentimentality, hope, pride, etc.
- Appeals to positive emotion are only effective if they can accomplish both:
- Creating a positive emotion in the target audience
- Causing the target audience to pair the positive emotion with the argument or product.
- Appeals to Negative Emotion
- Messages meant to arouse negative feelings, like guilt, shame, sadness, anger, etc.
- Appeals to Negative Emotion are only effective if they can get the target audience to feel the negative emotion and then make the target audience feel that the persuader's method of relief is the correct method.
- Fear is actually such a big part of Negative Emotional appeals it has volumes more literature on it than any other negative appeal, so this is covered here:
- The Fear Appeal works by first making the target audience feel that a basic human need (e.g. safety, personal relationships, etc.) is being threatened.
- The Fear Appeal is then most effective if they can convince their target audience of several key points:
- Severity - the threat is serious and will take away some basic human need
- Susceptibility - the threat is likely to happen to the target audience.
- Response Efficacy - the threat can be resolved by the actions the persuader lays out.
- Self-efficacy - the target audience can take the actions necessary to resolve the threat.
- Use of storytelling/narrative
- Telling or showing a story with the persuasive goal as the lesson or product - think the DirecTV ads whose moral was "switch to DirecTV"
- Appeals to higher-order human needs
- Persuader suggests that the target audience can meet a need like esteem, belonging, or more rarely, self-actualization, with their product.
- e.g snob appeal to esteem, bandwagon appeal to belonging.
- Appeal to cultural value
- Can be stuff like individualism or freedom, and can also be appeals to stuff like holiday iconography.
- Source Qualities
- Credibility
- How believable is the source? Two (arguably three) dimensions of trustworthiness.
- Expertise
- Perceived training, knowledge, and experience of source on topic.
- Trustworthiness
- Perceived honest, integrity of source, including biases.
- Similarity with target audience
- Similarity being shared characteristics between source and receiver, along axes like attitudes, values, demographic details, appearance, etc.
- blue versus white collar stuff.
- Likeability
- Incldes being friendly, interesting, positive attitude, self assurance, empathy, etc. Likeability.
- Some argue that Likeability just acts as a roundabout way to generate trustworthiness.
- Physical Attractiveness
- Fame is the one that's a big mess in the research, because research effects suggests that there isn't an association. That said, the research does point towards celebrities having a positive effect if they are perceived to have expertise on the subject - a roundabout way of going through expertise.
- I'm skipping audience because that involves demographic and psychographic shit that we won't have until later, if ever, in the quest, forcing us to eyeball this stuff anyway.
