Hacking Tree: The Tone
The tone refers to the emotions that are evoked through your message that you want to spread in the conversation
Just like movies use sound, color, and rhythm to shape emotion (making a comedy funny and a horror movie scary), your hack needs to intentionally evoke specific sentiments. A clear, resonant tone helps your message land not just in the mind, but in the heart.
Deciding your tone is based on three elements::
- 3.1 Mood of current conversation: what is the underlying feeling present in the current discourse? Analyse the emotional patterns in your target audience: are people fearful, hopeful, angry, or joyful?
- 3.2 Feelings to generate in audiences: choose the emotions you want to trigger – ideally one or two with the right intensity. Maybe you want to shift fear into hope? Or apathy into enthusiasm?
- 3.3 Stimuli: within your chosen media – what are the elements of the hack that will cause a reaction. This is your creative toolbox: choice of colors, music, visuals, characters or gestures that evoke the feelings you want.
See an example
Two examples of the TOT Fellows hacks, based on the overarching reframe: Land Back to Right Relations, that demonstrates the tone choices of the hack were:
Recipes for Revolution (Narrative action: Indigenous recipe book and communal feasting: celebrating land and food).
- Mood of current conversation: loneliness; separation; individual struggle
- Feelings to generate in audiences: togetherness; communality
- Stimuli: Food
We Are From The Land: (Narrative action: conversations, along with a guide book on how to host these intergenerational conversations between grandparents who work the land and the youth who have emigrated to the cities – to imagine together how to get back to land).
- Mood of current conversation: Separation; disconnect; split generations;
- Feelings to generate in audiences: togetherness; celebration, hope, joy, optimism, solutions-focused
- Stimuli: Food; Sowing seeds/working with the land.