Conceptions of audience from print and e-media

An overview.

print, generally for mass audience focuses on

• audience as target: see St Sebastian
• primary and secondary audiences
• the print medium: production by experts; distribution limited and costly; use in reading, browsing, ...
• dominant goal: to sell advertising

electronic, mass and individual, focuses on

• rhetor's relationship with audience
• the roles audience are cast in: VisitorRoles
• audience as active: AudienceAsUser
• the online medium: production by all users; distribution wide and inexpensive; use in reading, browsing, searching...
• dominant goals: sell advertising and products, but also visibility, notoriety, self-expression, reciprocal sharing, become part of a community...

The typical print conception of audience

Contemporary print conceptions of audience are tailored for one-to-many communication, from one source to a mass, relatively homogenic, and distant - not present - audience.

The designers of print mode mass messages address shape their message to suit this conception of the audience. One recent design text uses the commonplace of audience-as-target:

Advice on web design and usability cast audiences (visitors) as fickle, impatient, skittish, and ready to run to another site when emotionally or intellectually challenged. A recent web design book is titled "Don't Make Me Think."

Some characteristics of the mass print audience

The typical mass conception casts the audience as relatively passive, and relatively dim in relation to the mass rhetor.

• Audiences need to be attracted.
• They are easily distracted, even when they are politely trying to pay attention.
• They need to be lead by the hand thorough even the simplest argument.
• They have a short attention span - although no one knows what they're thinking about when they aren't listening.
• They fear challenges to well-worn habits and intellectual paths.
• They respond well to novelty and bright colors.
• They get lost easily and so need transitions to help them.
• They react by brainstem, so they like humor (but not too articulate or complex) and shiny pictures.
• They are easily led.

In a typical relation between message and reader, the reader is cast as

• more or less passive receiver - rather than an active, thinking, critical producer
• unchanging - rather than constantly changing and changeable
• decontextualized - rather than existing and placed in space and time and gender
• fickle - and so must be catered to
• more or less attracted to the message as a magpie to shiny objects - rather than more or less made receptive to it

Conceiving of an audience as a target audience may help writers aiming at a homogenic, mass audience make choices, and determine the success of their persuasive work. But targets are stable, unthinking, passive objects that communicators shoot things at. Audiences are active, independent, thinking human beings who rhetors seek to move, change, or gain assent from. Targets just stand there, bristling with arrows.

Audiences at large are more complex than the characterization mass media tends to use.

Online audiences have significantly more options than print audiences. Rhetors connect with - locate and address - online audiences in significantly different ways than they do in print.

Audience from a rhetorical perspective

For rhetorical analysis - especially in the electronic media - other conceptions of the relation between message and reader, rhetor and visitor, can yield insights that the static concept of target audience conceals. Our aim in e-rhetoric is less to generate text to suit an audience so much as to step outside the rhetorical situation in order to analyze the relationship between the rhetor - message - audience.

A rhetorical conception, the audience i

• situated in place, time, culture: Audiences addressed are specific in time and place: Gap ads from 1999 are now dated.
• material: Audiences are using cell phones, laptops, and are working in environments that are busy and loud or not.
• active: From a rhetorical perspective, audiences must actively cooperate with the rhetor in creating meaning - and so the rhetor must actively engage the audience. (S&P, pp 56ff)

Changes in the E-media

Rhetor - message - audience relations changes depending on the type of communication. The relationship between the three in a set of delicious tags is different than the relation between them in a commercial web page, which is again different than that of an educational web page.

There are some changes in features:

• shift from mass to personal address
• change in level of formality of language
• change in acknowledged presence of a reader
• changes in audience involvement with the message and the medium: reader becomes user: AudienceAsUser

Whatever the media, a message conceptualizes and projects an audience in particular rather than general ways:

• assumes that certain values and ways of thinking are shared
• places its audience in particular cultural and material positions
• establishes a particular relation with the audience
• assigns the audience particular roles

By describing (and then analyzing) the message, we can get a trace of how visitors are being cast.

Audience and Roles

The audience is being asked to play a different role, stand in a different relationship with the rhetor and the message. A useful perspective to take on audience starts by considering (in specific terms) Who is being addressed by this message?

But it continues with other search method questions:

• What relationship is the rhetor striking with the audience?
• In what role is the rhetor casting the reader?
• What is the rhetor doing to help the audience/reader play that role?

For an exercise in looking at audience role in podcasts, see PodcastAudienceRolesExercise

For an exercise in audience analysis from this perspective using a web site, see WhoAmIThisTimeExercise.

AudienceAsUser discusses the shift in conception

VisitorRoles presents the analysis of BSU and SCSU web sites using visitor roles approach.

Categories: Lecture, Audience, Podcasts