As the audience changes, rhetoric changes. Aristotle taught us rhetoric is "the ability to discover the available means of persuasion in a given case" and revealed to us the significant relationship between rhetoric and its audience. Since the days when Aristotle first proposed his theories of rhetoric, the rhetorical audience has undergone several different, societal changes.

Now, in the technologically eclectic world of postmodern American society, a community of wireless screens and supersaturated information, rhetoric has changed once again. Communication and rhetoric are no longer tied to the time-consuming forms practiced by those rhetoricians of the golden ages. Instead, rhetoric finds its fulfillment in quick, fragmented arguments, custom designed to the first ever "zapping" generation.

Our postmodern American population, in which four million children are prescribed daily doses of ritalin, simply does not possess the capacity to decode endless communication in the way past generations have. In her book Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Kathleen Hall Jamieson discusses this rhetorical development in the context of American political advertising:

"The average number of seconds a candidate for president was shown speaking on a network news segment in the 1984 campaign was 14.79 seconds…By 1964 the public had been conditioned by spot political ads to expect its political information in twenty-, thirty-, and sixty-second bites" (Jamieson 9, 10).

Predictably, current trends in the pervasion of rhetorical bits and shards do not indicate a divergence from the shortened new rhetoric. A massive change in the audience’s emotions (pathos) and its collective desires dictates that the rhetors of the future must be capable in fifteen second sound bites and fragmented visual clips.