Cool - notes

Quotes (some marked, some not) are from Classical Rhetoric Up in Smoke

Cool
anti-persuasive persuasion
the interface itself

Cultural cool =>history (through 2000)
changes with each generation.
Features: narcissi, ironic detachment, hedonism => private rebellion
"a permanent state of private rebellion" (Poutain + Robins) => rebelling in the right way (Pepper)
both about private self and connecting to a group

Digital cool - discussion of Rice
rhetorical action versus an ideologial stance
coolness based on rhetroical practice (not an identity)
interpretations are open (inferred, rather than "proved"/told or argued): agency in audience
cool strategies: appropriation, juxtaposition, and nonlinearty

Cool ethos - discussion of Liu

Cool, then, is an attitude where attention to choices within a wealth of possibilities, and the self-awareness of that attention, is more valuable and satisfying than any value the information itself may contain. Cool is the paradoxical creation of a difference that makes a difference only by noting how that difference comes into being only because it doesn't really make a difference.
//
Put differently, if information must be defined with the possibility of non-information, cool flips the script and decrees that non-information (lack of making a difference) is the most important difference possible because the individual's awareness of how much it doesn't matter is all that really matters.
//
With all the definitions of "cool" touched upon, we have to ask: How would cool persuasion operate and what is its relation to digital ethos? Is persuasion through cool even possible, or is it doomed to backfire on itself for bothering to care? 

The site: ethos, ethos, ethos (and some pathos)Thetruth.com is all about ethos, but not your Big Daddy A's ethos. They're not going to tell you who they really are, and they're not going to seek traditional credibility. They want to be cool. They're going to change your mind (maybe), but they're going to make you think you made that choice yourself.

 Social cool: the importance of interaction
. . . beyond aesthetics, thetruth has what Wysocki and Jasken (2004) called a "generous interface" (p. 29), meaning the interface offers multiple ways for a visitor to interact with the site and hopefully stay there. 

By encouraging participation (both socially and within the site itself) as a core component of their web place, thetruth ultimately highlights Liu's (2004) notion that "cool is an ethos or 'character' of information—a way or manner of living in the world of information" (p. 184). Information found on the site (or information that visitors post to social media sites) is not nearly as important as the ethos constructed by the site's mere existence and networked place amongst social media. After all, music festivals, video games, and sports interviews have no direct connection to convincing teenagers not to smoke. However, they are identity markers that are frequently discussed and shared across all areas of a typical teenager's world (and tap the hedonistic spirit that cool must emobdy). By focusing on these areas of entertainment, presented in a sleek, modern aesthetic that is familiar and holistic, thetruth commands its viewers to browse its pages and see themselves reflected with each interactive and self-validating click.

About them: Representation of "self"

Despite the focus on popular entertainment and social media, let us not forget that this is actually an advocacy site to discourage teen smoking. 

(conclusion to discussion of graffiti) . . . So not only does graffiti taunt those who can't read it (most often adults), it becomes a stand-in ethos for the artist that is more important than any other aspect of who they are. Digital ethos works similarly. Like graffiti artists leaving behind a tag that signifies them without really identifying them, thetruth has erected this website where their own "About Us" page tells absolutely nothing about who they really are. The entire site operates as their "tag." It's cool, it's anti-conformity, it's rebellious, and it says everything they want you to know about them simply for being there while simultaneously masking anything problematic.

Lousy Logos, the interface as the reason

 "The assumptions behind such advice ground the introduction in the practices of oral and print media. It is assumed the audience will hear or read linearly, and this limits the rhetorical impact of the exordium to making a good first impression" (p. 171). But what if the reader isn't reading linearly? And why should good impressions be limited to the very beginning of a piece that is often long forgotten by the time a reader delves further into an article? Questions like these lead Carnegie to suggest that, though new media has an exordium, it's no longer the literal introduction—it's the interface itself. Carnegie wrote:

Like the warp in a woven fabric, the interface as exordium is ever-present throughout a new media composition. Instead of making a good first impression, the exordium works continually to engage the audience not simply in action but in interaction. As users experience higher levels of interactivity, they experience higher levels of empowerment: they become senders and creators of messages and content. They experience higher levels of control: they choose between options and customize the interface to reflect their tastes, if not interests. (p. 171)

Online Advocacy: Digital cool and actual action (really?) 
Communicative technologies (fueled by digital networks) "fetishize speech, opinion, and participation" (p. 17); however, they do so within an economic climate that values individualism and "me first" greed (the 1980s are, after all, cool again). Thusly, communicative acts online don't spark in-depth discourse so much as they treat communication like an unlimited resource that anyone can create, primarily for the sake of its creation. Once this communication is created, it can be gathered, collected, and the individual can hold stock in it (pun intended). (Pepper)

Does cool work (does it matter)?

maybe a better question is the actual question the essay answers => how does it work?

Ultimately, "does it work?" is probably the wrong question to ask, at least in regards to cool as a rhetorical tactic. Yes, cool persuasion is a deliberate attempt. I think it's clear that thetruth have made many choices in trying to construct the digital ethos of their interface. They are certainly trying to be persuasive, albeit while trying not to look like they're trying. But once the decision is made to bet on cool, the rhetor, and anyone analyzing their intent, can no longer rely on the assessment methods of rhetorical theory historically conceived. As a strong summary of rhetorical theory's intent problem, I quote at length from Thomas Rickert (2013):

Speakers or writers may well understand themselves as working with conscious intent, yet the intention may be casually irrelevant to the effects produced in an audience. Rhetorical theory tends to assume that intent equals result: a rhetor wants to persuade a group of people to vote a certain way, the rhetor succeeds, and therefore the rhetor's intent is held to have been successfully realized through his or her rhetorical art . . . curiously, however, intent is rarely called into question when a rhetorical message goes awry; rather, the issues becomes a matter of technique . . . failure results because one's message was not sufficient for the intent, because one was unprepared for the specific audience, because one made a mistake, and so on. There is no leeway for accidental persuasion, for persuasion at odds with or in spite of intent or even the artistry of rhetorical work. (p. 35)

Cool seems to provide (even account for) this leeway that Rickert was interested in exploring. It's not so simple to ask if cool persuasion "worked." Worked how? Worked in persuading a group of people towards action (like not smoking) or worked in getting them to pay attention to their own attention? Cool doesn't seem to preference one over the other because coming off too adamant about a specific outcome threatens the delicate balance that cool depends on. Is gaining attention enough? Again, this feels like the wrong question. Enough what? These often productive questions betray the obsession with specific intent and conscious outcome that Rickert critiqued. If we suspect cool persuasion doesn't work then, as Rickert suggested, our go-to result/explanation would usually involve questioning the technique used. Although we may question whether or not striving for cool was the best rhetorical decision, any attempt to actually critique whether or not cool itself is effective will be rendered moot by cool's built-in safeguard. Using cool as a persuasive tactic is to say that you ultimately realize you can't control how an audience will react to potentially influential information because that potentiality can only be recognized by an individual's subjectivity. Cool's rhetorical focus is not on providing persuasive information; cool's rhetorical focus is on creating the pleasing condition of information meta-awareness.