‘The new oratory’: Public speaking practice in the digital,neoliberal age

Abstract

This study discusses the paradigm shift that has occurred in public speaking practice in the first two decades of the 21st century, conceptualised under the term ‘the New Oratory’. The New Oratory is a product of the digital revolution in that it brings together formats that are typically relayed via videos uploaded to the Internet, and serves as a vector of the new, digital economy. Drawing on previous critical work linking language and discourse to what is referred to as the new economy, late or new capitalism or neoliberalism, the study focuses on two aspects of discourse practice that can be explained due to developments within the current economic climate: (1) the entrepreneurial speaker ethos that is embodied by the start-up generation of entrepreneurs, finds a resonance in Anglo communication culture and is closely linked to the neoliberal emphasis on branding; (2) the model of horizontal knowledge or information-sharing (in which the Internet has played a major role), whereby a move from specialist to non-specialist target audiences is shifting the frontiers of discourse communities and leading to their reorganisation. These two phenomena are illustrated via examples taken from two formats: the investor pitch and the three-minute-thesis presentation. The first belongs to the corporate sector, the second to academia. The study highlights the neoliberal forces at work outside the corporate sector per se which have come to influence most spheres of professional, social and personal lives, as well as the way these forces are ultimately being promoted by the emergence of a new, fairly homogeneous discursive setup.

Keywords

Conversationalisation dialogic staging digital eloquence discourse community ethos horizontality infotainment investor pitch personal branding rhetoric three-minute-thesis presentation

Introduction

The 21st century has given rise to the development of a number of new discursive practices in oral communication. Taken together, new formats such as corporate keynotes, TED talks, investor pitches or three-minute-thesis (3MT^®) presentations – to name the most iconic – have forged a new face for public speaking, founding what can be referred to as the ‘New Oratory’ (Rossette-Crake, 2019).

The New Oratory has come of age thanks to the Internet and is disseminated via online video. It addresses not only a live audience, but also Internet viewers, who make up a global, potentially vast, audience. As such, the New Oratory places the spotlight on the ‘digital speaker’ (Hickman, 2017), to borrow a term used by one of the actors and promoters of ‘the speaker industry’. The digital speaker practises a ‘digital eloquence’ that, in many aspects, presents an updated version of the ‘electronic eloquence’ described by K. Hall Jamieson (1988) in regard to the way political oratory was transformed by radio and television during the last century.

However, the New Oratory is a product of digital technologies in more ways than one. In addition to being relayed via the Internet, New Oratory formats arose out of the key role they have played in the promotion of these very technologies (e.g. product launches during keynotes and other speaking events developed on the Silicon Valley corporate scene).¹ This is one of the reasons why the New Oratory is both informed by and informs the economic forces of the neoliberal economy (Holborow, 2015; McElhinny, 2016), replicating the values underpinning the new work order (Gee et al., 1996) and the new economy (Duchêne and Heller, 2012; Heller, 2003), which, in their recent developments, particularly as regards the upsurge of the service industries, are conditioned by the products and services born out of the digital era.

Up until now, relatively little critical work has been published on these new digital discursive practices. Isolated studies on one or another of the formats have been carried out by scholars from various fields such as linguistics, communication or English for special purposes (ESP). For instance, TED talks have been studied from various angles: as corpora to analyse specific linguistic phenomena, such as markers of appraisal or discourse markers (Caliendo and Campagnone, 2014; Uicheg and Crabtree, 2018), as an ESP resource (Chang and Huang, 2015) or as a basis for communication pedagogy (Taylor, 2016). 3MT presentations have received attention in regard to their relation to other academic genres, as gauged notably via the lens of move analysis (Carter-Thomas, Rowley-Jolivet, 2019; Hu and Liu, 2018). Similarly, sales pitches have been analysed in terms of rhetorical strategies (e.g. Clark, 2008; Daly and Davy, 2016a, 2016b). However, despite acknowledging the mutation that has occurred in public speaking practice in recent years (Crowe and Frank, 2016; Frobish, 2000), there is little systematic – and critical – appraisal of these new digital formats linked to the hypothesis that they be part of a similar social phenomenon.

The purpose of this article is to outline some of the main characteristics of the New Oratory as a product of the digital, neoliberal age. Indeed, the New Oratory shares many features with entrepreneurial discourse, and can be analysed in light of work belonging to the fast-growing field of entrepreneurship studies (McAdam and Cunningham, 2019; Neergaard and Ulhoi, 2007), which includes research from management and organisational studies as well as discourse analysis. Critical discourse studies on entrepreneurship (Ahl, 2007; Dey, 2013; Komulainen, 2006; Laine and Vaara, 2010; Oinonen, 2018) follow in the path of Fairclough (1993, 1994), Swales and Rogers (1995) and Gee et al. (1996). Fairclough (1993) identifies interconnected developments in the discursive practices of late capitalist society, in particular, (1) the ‘technologisation’ of discourse, or the redesigning of discourse practices according to efficiency; (2) the decline of relationships based on authority, which results for instance in the need to constantly negotiate them; (3) the move towards discourse as ‘a vehicle for “selling”’ that informs ‘the general reconstruction of social life on a market basis’ and manipulates interpersonal meaning for strategic effect, especially in the context of self-promotion, which is ‘becoming part-and-parcel of self-identity’ (p. 142). These phenomena are instantiated linguistically by the trend towards the ‘conversationalisation’ of public discourses (Fairclough, 1993, 1994).

The New Oratory formats exemplify these developments. I will focus here on two main aspects. First, it exemplifies self-promotion and personal branding: as such, it is informed by an entrepreneurial speaker ethos that, in the form it has recently taken, can be traced to the high-tech sector and start-up culture. Second, it exemplifies the decline in relationships of authority by producing instances of horizontal knowledge-sharing; the ‘new knowledge order’ or ‘new knowledge economy’ (McElhinny, 2012) brought about by the World Wide Web has led to a redistribution of discourse communities (Swales, 1990), and explains moreover the move towards infotainment, or what will be referred to here as ‘showledge’.

A more general issue is that of English-language and cultural hegemony. The New Oratory formats all hail from English-speaking countries, particularly from the American corporate context. As such, they are characteristic of Anglo communication culture, specifically American corporate culture. However, they have been adopted very quickly the world over: today, they are performed not only in English (L1 and L2) but also in the local language.² Strikingly, performances in the local language conform to English-speaking norms and ideology and feature very few, if any, cultural adjustments.³ They hence provide an example of standardised discursive practice which can well be considered a threat to cultural diversity.

In what follows, I will first define the New Oratory in terms of a specific discursive setup, before turning to the abovementioned issues. Space prevents me here from quoting examples from all of the formats belonging to the New Oratory (see Rossette-Crake, 2019). Instead, I will illustrate the aforementioned points via examples from two different genres: the investor pitch and the 3MT presentation. The first belongs to the corporate world, the second to academia. However, the New Oratory attests to the way discursive practice and the underlying values of the digital and neoliberal age that (first) developed within the corporate sector have carried over into other spheres, of which academia proves one of the most striking examples.

A specific discursive setup

The new public speaking formats share a discursive setup resulting from the combination of a number of parameters in terms of participants and conditions of delivery. First, as regards participants, it instantiates public speaking as no longer limited to public figures. Up until now, the most iconic examples of public speaking have derived from the field of political oratory: as public figures, politicians have been the main speakers to take to the stage. However, due to the invention of online video and subsequent new forms of media (e.g. YouTube, Instagram), the stage is now being claimed by previously unknown individuals. And it is notably thanks to the new digital speaking formats that such individuals are able to build a reputation and forge a public status. ‘Youtubers’ and other ‘influencers’ are examples of this.

Second, as mentioned above, the New Oratory, because it is relayed via the Internet, involves two levels of addressees. These belong, respectively, to (1) the direct audience, who is physically present during the delivery, and (2) the secondary audience, who is made up of Internet viewers.⁴ The direct audience can include, in the case of competitions (investor pitches and 3MT presentations), a jury as well as a ‘general’ audience. The direct audience guarantees the conditions of real-time interaction (e.g. real-time feedback such as applause, laughter, cheering, etc.) and creates for the secondary audience, the illusion that they are part of a real-time interaction. At the same time, the need to cater to the secondary audience conditions many aspects of the live delivery (e.g. staging constraints due to filming). The electronic eloquence of the 20th century had already ushered in an analogous two-level addressee structure. For instance, the fact that excerpts of speeches would be included in evening news bulletins led politicians (or their speech writers) to systematise the practice of sound bites; alternatively, President Roosevelt developed a new form of weekly radio address to speak directly to the American people during his ‘fireside chats’ of the 1930s and 1940s (Hall Jamieson, 1988); and interviews broadcast on radio or airing on television presented a new form of ‘staged’ dialogue which integrated into the conversation elements of performance (Kerbrat-Orrechioni, 1990). As will be discussed below, these various phenomena have been taken to new levels in the New Oratory formats.

In addition to the participant setup, the New Oratory brings together a number of conditions of delivery in terms of time and space. There is a clear propensity for short formats, including those that impose a time limit (ranging from 1 minute for some investor pitches, to 18 minutes for TED talks), often in the context of a competition. In the case of the three-minute-thesis presentation, the time limit is eponymous, and as such can be considered one of the main defining features of the genre. Similarly, in the example of the investor pitch that will be quoted below, the time limit literally takes centre stage as the 60-second countdown is projected on the screen behind the speaker.

Turning specifically to spatial variables and staging, the New Oratory is defined by heightened forms of technical accompaniment. As well as being filmed, most speeches have developed the multimodal spectrum and systematically combine the verbal and visual modes via the quasi obligatory slide presentation. For instance, one of the rules for 3MT presentations is that speakers speak to one single slide which is projected throughout the performance. In addition, speakers now have at their disposal a number of technical tools, such as prompters, head microphones, and so on.

Indeed, the use of prompters is one of the factors that enable the speaker to forego the written script, remove any visible trace of written preparation, and simulate spontaneity or produce ‘feigned orality’ (Goody, 2014). Alternatively, speeches are learnt off by heart, marking a return to the classical tradition of memoria. This goes hand in hand with a renewal of the tradition of actio in the broad sense in that the speaker’s body is no longer positioned behind a pulpit but appears in full view of the audience. Video recordings of the performances include many long shots featuring the body in full view. Just as importantly, the speaker is now free to move about the stage, and is indeed often expected to do so. Another distinctive feature of the New Oratory is a dress code which is deliberately downplayed and fairly casual: for males, suits may be worn, but never with a tie (TED talk regulations stipulate that ties are to be avoided), and jeans and t-shirts are not uncommon.

The choice to discard the pulpit is particularly significant. A speaker devoid of a pulpit produces a scenography which is less hierarchical. Removing the pulpit works to negate the asymmetrical relation between speaker and audience that can be considered a defining component of the public speaking setup (Rossette, 2017). Similarly, there is a tendency towards a lowering of the stage itself, and in some cases (e.g. many sales pitches and 3MT presentation competitions), the stage is non-existent, with the speaker basically sharing the same space and appearing on the same level as the audience. This spatial ‘levelling out’ between speaker and audience is iconic of the fundamental turn referred to in the previous section from hierarchical to horizontal relations both in the corporate context and in other spheres of public life.

Two examples: An investor pitch and a 3MT presentation

Characteristics of the New Oratory are illustrated here by way of two genres: the investor pitch, which belongs to the corporate world, and the 3MT presentation, which belongs to that of academia. As well as the common features of the setup presented in the previous section, these speech types also share the fact that they are performed in the context of a competition, in front of a jury, who is called upon to designate a winner. As regards the two specific examples of each format that have been chosen, both stage non-native speakers of English, competing in competitions hosted in an English-speaking country (the United States for the investor pitch, Australia for the 3MT). While second-language status can be gauged from certain components of the presentations (mainly phonetically and in terms of intonation), it is striking to what extent each has integrated what can be considered English-language cultural norms, both in terms of content and delivery style (see section ‘Embodied speech, and a personal, “presentable” persona’). The two examples presented below very closely mirror the various discursive characteristics that feature in examples studied elsewhere (Rossette-Crake, 2019) produced by native speakers of English from a variety of English-speaking countries. As winning presentations, these examples demonstrate that speakers are required to discursively adhere to certain key aspects of the neoliberal ideology that underlie Anglo-American corporate culture.⁵

The investor pitch

The investor pitch brings together entrepreneurs, or budding entrepreneurs, who present their business plan in order to convince investors to finance their project. Typical examples are competitions that take place during ‘start-up weekends’ (the first of which took place in the United States in 2007). These bring together developers and actors from the business sector, who form teams to launch new start-up companies.

Like all sales pitches (with the exception of the personal pitch for job interviews), the investor pitch is based on a need-fulfilment format. Several moves can be distinguished: (1) speaker identification (the speaker introduces him/herself and/or the name of the company; (2) need; (3) fulfilment (presentation of the product or service); (4) business model; (5) request for capital; (6) signing off. As opposed to many other New Oratory formats, the investor pitch is followed by a question time between the investors and the speaker and other team members. Unlike a 3MT or a TED talk, it therefore serves as a conversation-opener: it does not have to provide all the information of the business plan, which can be left to the discussion.

The following speech is the winning pitch (without the Q&A part, that is four times as long as the pitch) delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) start-up weekend in 2010. It was transcribed from the video uploaded to YouTube:⁶

Everyone, how many of you guys are using your email to collaborate with people outside of your organisation? And how many think that’s really efficient? Exactly. We’ve built a web-based work platform that organizes work across people and across organisations, because we believe that is where work is heading. We also believe that each organisation has a unique way of doing things, so we’ve just built the platform on which you build the functionality and the applications. Whether it’s for organizing a meeting, events, sharing your tasks or fixing your box, you get a tool that works like you, not the contrary. We want to become your platform for work like Facebook is for your social life. Therefore we have entered this enterprise market with a consumer business model, with a freemium player and premium on top, and that makes us grow 40% a month. Currently though we’re still in private data. So, in short, we help you out with the problem that is there to start with, so we organize your work.

The 3MT presentation

3MT presentations provide PhD students or early career researchers with the opportunity to communicate with the general public about their research. Speeches are delivered during competitions organised in universities. Early versions of the format date from the beginning of the decade, but the first publicised competition of note was organised in 2008 by the University of Queensland in Australia, which made Three-Minute-Thesis Presentations, or ‘3MT’, a registered trademark.⁷ The first international competition was organised in 2010, and now more than 600 universities belong to the official ‘3MT’ network and organise competitions for their PhD students. Added to these are other university networks that organise, under different names, competitions abiding by the same principle.

The 3MT contrasts with other academic genres such as the written version of the PhD, the oral PhD viva or the conference paper where, typically, academics communicate with other academics belonging to the same discipline. The 3MT is conditioned by the fact that it targets what is qualified as a ‘non-specialist’ audience and therefore negotiates between two communities of reference, a point we will return to in the section ‘Horizontal knowledge-sharing’. The presentation is based on the following moves: < General + Specific [Question + Answer] >. The 3MT echoes the PhD itself – and most academic research – of which the aim is to provide an answer to a leading question, verify a hypothesis, and so on. However, unlike the PhD, the < Question + Answer > move is embedded within the move < General + Specific > as the aim is to place the specific research question within the wider landscape of general knowledge to which the non-specialist audience can relate. This general picture is provided as of the speech opening, and is picked up again in the closing of the speech.

The following presentation is the winning speech at the 3MT Asia Pacific Finals in 2018. Again, it has been transcribed⁸ from the video uploaded to the Internet (the ensuing Q&A last another 2 minutes):⁹

Have you ever been bitten by mosquitoes? Literally, they suck. And then they bite, they make us itch, but more than that, they transmit deadly diseases across the globe, including dengue. In a year, 390 million people fall victim to dengue. That’s like 16 times the population of Australia today. And 70% of deaths caused by the virus are due to one reason: a delay in detection. I was a victim of dengue myself – horrible experience – I had a high fever for three days, and the doctors, like the mosquitoes, took my blood again and again. And it was not until the fourth day that they could finally confirm I had the infection, and start proper treatment, but by then, I was even too weak to drink on my own, and had to be put on drips for a whole week. I felt helpless and afraid, but the worst part was having to witness other victims in my ward succumb to dengue, just because they were not treated in time. I was lucky to survive, and I felt that nobody should die from something as trivial as a mosquito bite, right? And so, I dedicated the next few years of my life to find a solution.

What I developed is a dengue sensor, which is able to detect the virus more accurately, and in a much shorter time. Meet my dengue detective. It holds three basic components: light, antibodies, and a tapered optical fibre which has not been used before. And all it needs from a patient is one tiny drop of blood. Now let me tell you how it works. Envision an underway glass tunnel – you know, the ones you walk through at aquatic exhibitions, with sharks, stingrays swimming all around you? Well now visualise this tapered optical fibre as that glass tunnel – immerse in that patient’s blood sample. And on the surface of this glass tunnel, I immobilised antibodies to capture the virus. Next, I transmit light, to travel through this fibre tunnel, and indicate the presence and quantity of the virus. And voilà! Dengue is detected and quantified. This dengue detector holds great promise. Now let me tell you why. First, it is highly sensitive and reliable. Second, it is affordable for all clinics to use. Lastly, and most importantly, it is able to reduce the detection time, from four days to just fifteen minutes, which give dengue victims a greater chance to survive.

This technology is a huge step forward in the future of dengue diagnostics. Mosquitoes will still suck, but this sensor will detect the virus in time, case closed. Thank you.

An entrepreneurial speaker ethos

Corporate and personal branding

Like most New Oratory formats, the investor pitch and 3MT presentation exemplify the impetus placed on branding, specifically personal branding which, under the influence of the digital economy, now permeates most aspects of professional and social lives. The New Oratory first developed as part of corporate branding, starting with that of the high-tech sector. Steve Jobs’ iconic keynotes became the cornerstone of Apple’s marketing strategy, and are indicative of the prominent role that CEOs are now called upon to play in modern-day corporate communication. The increasingly public role of CEOs in corporate communication defines the new economy, where ‘shareholder’ (or specialised) communication has been replaced by ‘stakeholder’ communication that targets the wider community of individuals, particularly consumers, who recognise themselves in the company brand. The CEO now assumes the role of spokesperson and guarantor who publicly embodies the company’s values and as such puts an individual, human face on the company.

The New Oratory lends itself as a tool for such branding – be it personal branding, or exemplary embodiment for corporate branding – for clearly identifiable reasons. Because it no longer limits public speaking to public figures, actors from many sectors of society (e.g. corporate, technology and innovation, academia) are now not only able to claim a public voice but are in fact obliged to do so, precisely because of the new economy. The new work order is defined by an increasingly competitive, global, mobile and precarious workforce (Gee et al., 1996), a ‘brave new world of invention, individual energy and motivation’ (Holborow, 2015: 76), a world of work based on project management, projects that are limited in time and missions that are constantly changing and being (re)negotiated. The New Oratory provides one of the mouthpieces for such (re)negotiation, in an era that imposes the ‘continual reinvention of the self’ (Holborow, 2015). In the corporate sector, this is epitomised by pitches, particularly the investor pitch (i.e. pitching a business project). Likewise, in academia, the 3MT epitomises the self-branding that is now necessary for academics, particularly young researchers starting out in their career (for instance, 3MTs are often a gateway to obtaining post-doctoral contracts). Finally, TED talks provide a very interesting case in point: initially, they featured institutional specialists, particularly scientists, who talked about their confirmed area of expertise. Now, the talks act ‘as a kind of shop window for speakers’ (Hickman, 2017), providing a space where every speaker can (re)invent him or herself: the repertoire of topics includes and is in fact now dominated by ‘soft subjects’, mainly self-improvement, in talks delivered by pseudo-specialists who, thanks to their TED talk, carve out an area of expertise and a market for it, even creating new profiles/job titles for themselves.¹⁰

These discursive practices therefore also provide a microphone for speakers to both realise and showcase their own entrepreneurship. And strikingly, some of the formats have themselves become brands. ‘3MT’ is a registered trademark of the University of Queensland, which makes use of it in its own institutional branding. Similarly, while TED labels itself as a ‘non-profit’ and disassociates itself from business and political interests, it has developed the ‘TED talk’ as a quasi brand.

Embodied speech, and a personal, ‘presentable’ persona

Conditioned by their role in personal and corporate branding in a neoliberal context where the creed is one of ‘radical individualism’ (Holborow, 2015), New Oratory formats call upon speakers to speak in their own name and to embody, in every sense of the word, their discourse: through their words, but also through their physical presence on stage, via their entire body, which is in full view. Indeed, speakers not only put a human face (cf. the ‘talking heads’ of the television era), but a ‘human body’ on their discourse. In this, they stand in sharp contrast to speakers assuming roles in other forms of discourse engendered by digital technologies: that is, virtual, non face-to-face, often anonymous and disembodied discourse; and it is in contrast to these virtual forms that a new, added value has been bestowed on public speaking, where addressing a live audience in real time remains an essential part of the setup (cf. section ‘A specific discursive setup’).¹¹

Digital speakers also embody their discourse by developing a personal speaker ethos. This is clear from the beginning of our 3MT example: the speaker talks about herself, referring to how she was a victim of the disease dengue, and then going into the detail of this personal story:

I was a victim of dengue myself – horrible experience – I had a high fever for three days, and the doctors, like the mosquitoes, took my blood again and again. And it was not until the fourth day that they could finally confirm I had the infection, and start proper treatment, but by then, I was even too weak to drink on my own, and had to be put on drips for a whole week. I felt helpless and afraid, but the worst part was having to witness other victims in my ward succumb to dengue, just because they were not treated in time. I was lucky to survive, and I felt that nobody should die from something as trivial as a mosquito bite, right? And so, I dedicated the next few years of my life to find a solution.

The speaker uses evaluative language (‘horrible’), relates her feelings (‘I felt helpless and afraid’), explains how she was a firsthand witness to victims who did not survive and cites her personal reaction to this as the initial key motivation for her research. By appealing to her own experience and laying herself on the line in this way, the speaker orchestrates a personal and emotional connection with her audience, which is in stark contrast to the distant, impersonal voice that characterises traditional academic discourse, particularly PhD writing. Moreover, the speech contains 11 instances of ‘I’ in subject position, 8 in this passage, where ‘I’ appears 7 times as subject to a mental process, before then featuring as subject to a material process (‘dedicate’) at the end of this excerpt as well as in the ensuing examples of the speech (‘I developed . . .’; ‘I immobilised . . .’; ‘I transmit . . .’), whereby the speaker highlights her role as agent of the research process.

First-person reference also prevails in investor pitches. However, it takes the plural form, as exemplified by the pitch quoted above, which contains nine instances of the pronoun ‘we’. The plural inscribes the collective voice of the team of which the speaker is spokesperson; it points to the teamwork (another ‘buzzword’ of the new work order) behind the project, and also the reassuring image for potential investors of a project that results from the cooperation and collaboration of individuals who each contribute their specific area of expertise and work. Interestingly, in the pitch example, ‘we’ appears as subject to both mental processes (e.g. ‘believe’, ‘want’, ‘be’) and material processes (e.g. ‘build’, ‘enter’, ‘help’, ‘organize’): the former construe a subjective stance which, if ascribed to a collective, is mediated via the voice (and body) of one spokesperson; the latter highlight the agentive role of the collective. In both the 3MT and the pitch, a fairly balanced division of labour between mental and material processes contributes to the construal of an ethos that is both subjective, personal and founded on a belief system (a point I will return to below), but at the same time entrepreneurial in that, in keeping with some of the connotations attached to the term ‘entrepreneur’ (cf. ‘go-getter’, ‘mover and shaker’ (Holborow, 2015: 74)), it stages the speaker as a subject who seizes opportunities and takes initiatives.

These examples of personal, subjective ethos are comparable to the ‘synthetic personalization’ that Fairclough (1993) ascribes to the trend towards conversationalisation in the discourse practices of late capitalist society. Indeed, a personal ethos serves as an instrument for the commitment and engagement that are expected of today’s entrepreneurs – and modern speakers. For instance, ‘engagement’ (now an essential concept for corporate communication as regards the social media¹²) is one of the key components of the judging criteria of the 3MT.

Importantly, Anglo communication culture is particularly predisposed to a personal speaker ethos. Anglo culture is not only defined as both personal and individual but also as a permanent quest for ‘authentic’, ‘integrated’ and ‘presentable’ selves (Cameron, 2000: 3–6). ‘Authenticity’ and ‘presentability’ are interdependent, but will be discussed in turn here. Interestingly, authenticity has been highlighted particularly in relation to public speaking practice: unlike other cultures that foster a ‘norm of authority’ where distance and objectivity are held in high esteem, Anglo culture fosters a ‘norm of authenticity’ that ‘prompts the speaker not only to speak in an authentic manner but also to be the type of authentic person to whom the audience can easily relate’ (Boromisza-Habashi et al., 2016: 28–29). In terms of the dominant global corporate communication model, which takes its cue from the American corporate model, authenticity is a vector of the trust and confidence that have become so important in neoliberal branding.

Cameron’s definition also highlights the notion of ‘presentable’ selves which can be related in the business sphere to the American work ethic and corporate model whereby business ventures claim a high moral stake in the community they serve (D’Iribarne, 2019). A common theme of the new economy and its offshoots¹³ is encapsulated in the credo of ‘making the world a better place’. The theme is present in New Oratory formats outside the corporate sector per se. For instance, the 3MT presentation quoted above ends by underlining the contribution made by the PhD, which relates to public health and therefore to society at large: ‘This technology is a huge step forward in the future of dengue diagnostics’. The theme is present at a more general level in the credo of TED talks of ‘inspiring’ audiences.¹⁴

In the corporate sector, pitching a business project – and therefore the product or service that the project sets out to develop – includes reference to a belief system and to its underpinning set of values. This is intimated by the expression ‘we believe’ that is recurrent in investor pitches, appearing twice in consecutive sentences in the investor pitch quoted above. What is more, motivation for developing a product or service is linked to a higher, often noble cause. Explicit reference to ‘changing the world’ is common in corporate keynotes, such as one delivered by Tim Cook, CEO of Apple:

[. . .] we created Everyone Can Code, with free teaching and learning resources so that everyone can learn to code. It’s been so successful it’s now available to tens of millions of students around the world. Just imagine what this new generation of coders will create. Whatever it is, I’m sure that it’s going to change the world. (CNBC Keynote, 4 June 2018,¹⁵ my emphasis)¹⁶

Adherence to a belief system is part and parcel of the empowerment of workers and the construal of an ‘enchanted workplace’ that typifies the new work order (Gee et al., 1996). The New Oratory gives voice to this via an entrepreneurial speaking persona of sincerity and presentability which encapsulates one of the connotations now attached in the neoliberal age to the term entrepreneur as ‘the benign improver of society and the kind of person we could all aspire to being’ (Holborow, 2015: 74). In all the formats under study, this ‘kind of person’ is friendly and likeable, and adopts certain informal components of behaviour.

Informality

In the New Oratory, authenticity is also upheld by informal components. High-tech start-ups have put a modern face on the figure of the entrepreneur, following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, who left his mark on the world of communication because he injected into the inherently formal, institutional context of public speaking a new type of informality, fostering simplicity and casualness. This has already been underlined in terms of dress code: the male digital speaker often adopts jeans, possibly a jacket but never a tie (cf. section ‘A specific discursive setup’). Indeed, the speaker of our investor pitch wears a suit but no tie, and the sense of casualness is heightened by the jacket that is unbuttoned at the front. Likewise, the female speaker of the 3MT wears trousers and an unbuttoned jacket. Such ‘dressing down’ is also part and parcel of the fact that the archetype of the digital speaker is youthful – a speaker belonging to ‘generation Z’.¹⁷ While a more casual dress code is emblematic of the high-tech sector, the model is so strong that it has been introduced in other sectors, particularly in communication (e.g. trousers and jackets worn with sports shoes.)

Simplicity is also construed via other elements of the scenography. Stages are streamlined and relatively bare. This is particularly the case in the 3MT example, where the speaker stands on a very large, bare stage, talking against a uniform blue background with the 3MT logo (cf. branding, section ‘Corporate and personal branding’) repeated on it. Similarly, technical accompaniment is non-invasive and discrete. The speaker of the investor pitch has a hand-held microphone, but it is cordless; the speaker of the 3MT uses a lapel microphone. Neither speaker is seen pushing buttons to advance a slideshow, or glancing at a prompter.

And informality is injected into the discourse itself, via specific lexical choices. For instance, the investor pitch begins by referring to the audience as ‘guys’; the speaker of the 3MT uses the ‘sometimes vulgar’¹⁸ lexical item ‘suck’ in the play-on-words ‘mosquitoes suck’ at the beginning and end of the presentation. These are isolated examples; they have impact because they stand out against a lexical network that belongs to a relatively formal register. Each example plays a strategic role in key sections of each speech, in the attention-getter at the beginning of the pitch, and in the memorable statement (and sound bite) in the closing of the 3MT. Overall, informality is mainly construed by the syntactic choices typical of dialogic staging, as will be demonstrated in the following section.

Horizontal knowledge-sharing

Participatory culture and a redistribution of discursive communities

The move from hierarchical to horizontal relations and the decline of relationships based on authority is perceptible not only in the professional context but in many other spheres of social and public life (Fairclough, 1994; Gee et al., 1996). The New Oratory enacts such a move as it is both informed by and informs the horizontal transmission of knowledge for which the Internet has played a central role, particularly by engendering a ‘participatory’ web culture, of which TED is a prime example (Santini, 2015). Indeed, in the new information order brought about by the new knowledge economy (McElhinny, 2012), knowledge is no longer the property of ‘experts’ to be transmitted ‘vertically’. Instead, it is ‘shared’ (cf. TED’s mantra of ‘ideas worth sharing’) between non-specialists across disciplines.

Digital technologies have resulted in a situation where ‘access to knowledge expands while attention spans contract’ (Robinson, 2014), a phenomenon which is part of ‘a digital technology conversion [that] re-patterns human thought and community’ (my emphasis). The New Oratory participates in a redistribution of discourse communities (Swales, 1990). Specialised discourses (e.g. academic, corporate) are being de-compartmentalised and are integrating non-specialised ones, or at least being adjusted to the new purpose of catering to a non-specialist audience. This is illustrated by the 3MT, in which specialists – researchers – address a non-specialist audience and therefore need to make their research understood by people outside the specialist community. Another example of the shift in discursive communities is provided by investor pitches, which have become the object of reality television shows.¹⁹ These programmes have taken to a new level the de-compartmentalisation of corporate discourse performed by corporate keynotes and product launches, which are filmed and uploaded to the Internet, and are the object of much commentary in the general media. Investor pitches appear on prime-time television, and as such have entered (along with the figure of the entrepreneur) popular culture.

The shift towards a non-specialist target audience raises the issue of speaker authority. Speaker authority and credibility are no longer institutionally based, but construed within the discourse itself – hence, the strategic role of adopting, in the absence of such a ‘pre-discursive’ ethos, the right type of discursive ethos, according to the features discussed in the previous section. The non-distant, friendly and casual component of this speaker ethos is also an essential part of construing a horizontal as opposed to a vertical relation between speaker and audience. Another resource for construing horizontality, as already mentioned (cf. section ‘A specific discursive setup’), is the lowering of the level of the stage upon which the speaker stands, or the disappearance of the stage altogether. This is the case for the investor pitch quoted here. Another major resource is the fostering of a dialogue with the audience.

Dialogic staging

The two transcripts under study here display a syntax and a textual organisation that do not resemble those of ‘traditional’ English-language oratory such as political oratory. Neither transcript contains a high frequency of rhetorical figures of speech such as anaphora, other types of repetition, accumulation, hyperbole and so on. While the New Oratory exploits such figures, it does not do so to nearly the same extent as other examples of public speaking. These figures appear intermittently within a less formal textual organisation that echoes that of spoken language.

The digital formats foster a dialogue with the audience, drawing on a variety of linguistic forms typical of the turn-taking of conversation. Such ‘dialogic staging’ is another manifestation of conversationalisation, which includes ‘the simulation in institutional settings of the person-to-person communication of ordinary conversation’ (Fairclough, 1993: 141, my emphasis). One of the first iconic examples of this move towards conversation in political oratory was provided by President Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chats’ of the 1930s. In these radio addresses characteristic of the age of electronic eloquence (Hall Jamieson, 1988), the American president engaged with his audience of listeners as if he were having a direct conversation (or ‘chat’) with them; construal of intimacy was compounded by the iterative status of these addresses, which aired every week.

Similarly, digital speakers are not distant and authoritative, but engage directly with their audience, placing themselves symbolically and physically on the same level as them. This is part and parcel of adopting a personal voice (cf. section ‘An entrepreneurial speaker ethos’), as to do so, the speaker re-construes an interpersonal network which inscribes the presence of another entity with respect to whom the speaker positions him/herself. This is realised, for example, via the direct interrogative. Direct interrogatives are used in the investor pitch to launch the speech. The speaker addresses a series of two questions to the audience:

Everyone, how many of you guys are using your email to collaborate with people outside of your organisation? And how many think that’s really efficient?

There is a pause between each question, the second of which presupposes an answer to the first (for instance, ‘yes, the audience does use email to collaborate, etc’). Then follows the speaker’s reaction to the audience’s response to the second question (‘Exactly’). Again, the audience’s response must be rhetorically presupposed (in the video recording, there is no audible response from the audience and no shots of them, such as a show of hands).

The 3MT example also begins with a direct interrogative (‘Have you ever been bitten by mosquitoes?’). In addition, the passage discussed in section ‘Embodied speech, and a personal, “presentable” persona’ included, towards the end of the passage, a pseudo-tag use of ‘right’ pronounced with a rising intonation pattern, which works as a similar appeal to the audience (‘I was lucky to survive, and I felt that nobody should die from something as trivial as a mosquito bite, right?’). This dialogic textuality comes to a peak in the following part of the presentation (interactive forms in italics):

[. . .] What I developed is a dengue sensor, which is able to detect the virus more accurately, and in a much shorter time. Meet my dengue detective. It holds three basic components: light, antibodies, and a tapered optical fibre which has not been used before. And all it needs from a patient is one tiny drop of blood. Now let me tell you how it works. Envision an underway glass tunnel – you know, the ones you walk through at aquatic exhibitions, with sharks and stingrays swimming all around you? Well now visualise this tapered optical fibre as that glass tunnel – immersed in that patient’s blood sample. And on the surface of this glass tunnel, I immobilised antibodies to capture the virus. Next, I transmit light, to travel through this fibre tunnel, and indicate the presence and quantity of the virus. And voilà! Dengue is detected and quantified.

Interactive forms include the imperative (‘Meet my dengue detective’; ‘Well now visualise . . .’), as well as another utterance pronounced with a rising intonation that simulates a question (‘you know, the ones you walk through at aquatic exhibitions, with sharks, stingrays swimming all around you?’). Moreover, the speaker talks the audience through the test that she has devised as part of her PhD. This is announced explicitly (‘Now let me tell you how it works’). She theatrically signs off the imagined demonstration with a borrowing from the French (‘and viola!’).

The excerpt above also exemplifies use of a high frequency of discourse markers (‘now’, ‘you know’, ‘well’). These appear at the beginning of turns in conversation, where they play a pragmatic role in managing turn-taking. Here, use of discourse markers simulates such turn-taking, in addition to the repeated use in utterance-initial position of the coordinating conjunction ‘and’, which can also be compared to its turn-initial use in conversation. Likewise, in the investor pitch, choices of connectives echo conversation: ‘and’ is used, as well as three instances of ‘so’, two of which appear in consecutive clauses in the closing utterance of the pitch (‘So, in short, we help you out with the problem that is there to start with, so we organize your work’).

Finally, the investor pitch amplifies explicit second-person reference. It contains 12 instances of either the personal pronoun ‘you’ or the possessive determiner ‘your’. The pronoun appears in the role of complement in all but one instance, where it appears as subject, but subject to a process which inscribes it in the role of beneficiary (‘you get a tool that works’). This syntactic distribution points to the adjunctive role second-person reference plays with respect to the first-person reference, whereby it is exploited by the speaker as a reflexive positioning tool which ultimately serves to underline the speaker’s ‘upper hand’. In this, it meets the aims of personal branding while still levelling authority. The 3MT also features second-person reference, although not with the same intensity as in the investor pitch. The 3MT contains seven instances of the pronoun ‘you’, often in ritualistic expressions (‘Let me tell you’; ‘Now let me tell you why’; ‘thank you’).

And yet, while these formats borrow a number of linguistic features from conversation, the overall syntax and textual organisation does not replicate that of spoken discourse. Instead, dialogue is simulated, or staged within a monologic setup. There is not the syntactic complexity (e.g. recursive, embedded subordination) typical of spoken discourse (Halliday, 1985). Rather, the transcripts are made up of a chain of syntactically independent utterances that do not exceed a certain number of words, and include some very short utterances to create a contrastive, contrapunctal rhythm (for instance, the one-word utterance ‘Exactly’ of the investor pitch, or the three-word utterance ‘Literally, they suck’ of the 3MT). The rhythmic effect engendered via the delivery is one of the components of the theatricality of these speeches – which are indeed performed by the speakers.

Showledge

Addressing non-specialist audiences has various discursive consequences, one of which is the concision of these digital formats, a concision that caters to limited attention spans but also confirms the general trend in digital media towards shorter formats. Another consequence of a non-specialist audience is the heightened display of theatricality or show which, in some contexts, comes close to what is qualified as ‘infotainment’. The lead is taken from keynotes, which have been described by one commentator in the media of a non-English-speaking country as ‘not just presentations, but representations [. . .] during a keynote, the company’s big boss presents new products in a very theatrical way. It’s an extremely efficient and well-orchestrated show, of undeniable media impact’.²⁰

Well-orchestrated performances are part and parcel of the heavy formatting of these practices, of which no detail is left to chance. The New Oratory packages knowledge for a non-specialist audience within a show-like format that will be referred to here as ‘showledge’, where knowledge is transmitted as part of a full sensory experience, to be ‘delivered’ to the audience. Showledge appeals particularly to our sense of sight. This is materialised by multiplied multimodal resources, such as the incorporation of the visual accompaniment in the form of the slideshow, and the emphasis placed on the speaker’s entire body and extensive use of hand gestures (compared, for example, to the ‘talking heads’ of the television era).

Interestingly, a sense of staging is more acute in the example of the 3MT than in the investor pitch. The pitch is performed without a slide presentation, from the front of a room without a stage; however, the speaker occupies his (limited) space, moving backwards and forwards, and punctuating his pitch with a number of arm movements. For the 3MT, the speaker stands in front of several visual elements: the single slide illustrating the PhD, and the promotional backdrop upon which is duplicated the ‘3MT’ logo. The speaker chooses to exaggerate the sense of show, as indicated for instance by her use of the theatrical expression ‘And violà!’ already mentioned. While she does not make full use of all the space on the stage, she is mobile, constantly moving one step forwards, backwards or sideways. She multiplies her hand movements and facial expressions, with a new gesture accompanying almost every new utterance. This 3MT typifies the turn taken in many digital speaking formats, which are particularly symptomatic of the ‘videosphere’ (Debray, 2004), a world dominated by the visual dimension – one that is dictated by appearances, in which we have ‘rediscovered the human body’.

Conclusion

The purpose of this study has been to highlight the emergence of a number of comparable discursive practices over the first two decades of the 21st century. These practices share a striking amount of features and, according to the premise adopted here, collectively point to a paradigm shift in public speaking practice. This shift coincides with the development of digital technologies, is closely linked to the advent of online video and has been conceptualised here under the term ‘the New Oratory’.

Another part of the premise developed here is that the ‘digital eloquence’ underpinning the New Oratory is a hallmark of the neoliberal era, particularly in its most recent manifestations in connection to the digital revolution, both in terms of the economic transformations that have been set in motion by these technologies, and the way certain aspects of neoliberal ideology inform the medium itself.

This study discusses some of the discursive dimensions of these new formats as they are enlightened by the wider global, corporate and digital context. Two specific aspects have been highlighted: the entrepreneurial speaker ethos that is closely linked to the start-up generation of entrepreneurs, and that also finds a resonance in Anglo communication culture, as well as the now-dominant horizontal model for knowledge or information-sharing that is resulting in a reorganisation of discourse communities. These two aspects are illustrated via two examples of different speech formats, one from the corporate sphere and another from the academic sphere. The similarities that the two share, and which can be found in the other New Oratory formats, underline the influence of certain dimensions of neoliberal ideology which exceed the corporate sector per se, and also the power of a highly uniform discursive setup which ultimately contributes to the promotion of such an ideology.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Fiona Rossette-Crake is a Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of Applied Languages at Université Paris Nanterre, France, where she is responsible for a Masters programme in Intercultural and International Management. Her research focuses on a linguistic and discursive analysis of public speaking. She is President of AFLSF, the French Association for Systemic Functional Linguistics.

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