Interconnected The idea of a social rhetoric has been bubbling round my head. I'll outline my thinking first, and defend it next.

* Groups act in a way that is more than the sum of the individuals.
* There is communication going on at a group level, a social language.
* Given the paths of spoken language are hardwired into the brain, maybe social language is too.
* We need to develop a social rhetoric to harness and direct this social language.

Groups act in a way that is more than the sum of the individuals. Now you can invoke emergence and say that the behaviour of the group is nothing more than the interactions of individual behaviour, aggregated and displaying properties we couldn't have predicted. Firstly, that's indistinguishable from true group behaviour. But more importantly, second, that's too reductionist for my taste -- groups need to work well together, there's evolutionary pressure for this, and nature will make use of anything that's around. Watching a group making a seemingly logical decision is massively different to a single person or even two people. Anyway, if groups were simple enough to study as the addition of individuals we'd still need to look at individual-to-group communication, we'd still need to make abstractions because the number of one-to-one relationships increases massively as the group expands, and we'de still be exploring a new area. Groups are different.

There is communication going on at a group level, a social language. We know there's non-verbal communication going on, and from there it's the same argument as above: non-verbal communication with a number of people is different enough from one-to-one that we can label it "social language" and move on. But ultimately, it feels right that there's something special going on here. It's a whole other ballgame speaking in a group where pheromones, many-to-many gestures, body language, feedback loops, group think, social pressures come into play.