about; that is what Mark Antony is doing. But the real modernization of rhetoric happens in the 1930s. Because people do not go back and look at the actual intellectual model used by Mussolini, Hitler and other people, they do not recognize when those tools are being transferred by speech makers into selling of a political programme. Very few technocrats -- inclined as they are to avoid public discourse -- actually understand the choices that they are making, because they have not stepped back and looked at the history of rhetoric -- particularly in the 20th century. Marshall McLuhan understood what was going to happen in communications almost half a century before most of the machines that would do it were invented. He did not have to imagine machines in an H.G. Wells way. In the same way, the genius of the Nazis and Fascists was that they understood -- even when the mechanics of communication were very limited -- how many doors were opened by communications technologies, and what you could do with them. And that is why speech writers and advertisers are today still living off of what was invented by those people. GB How should an aspiring political rhetorician understand his or her role in the context of the proliferation of these new media (like Twitter, Facebook and Google)? JRS Generally, it is what I said at the beginning: it all comes back to saying precisely what it is that you wish to say, and not what