Casting Visitors in Roles / Helping them Play that Role

see ConceptionsOfAudience and AudienceAsUser and WhoAmIThisTimeExercise

The print conception of the mass audience misses the sense of audience on the web

Set aside the print conception of audience for a more active sense of audience. Audiences - readers or visitors - are more complex than targeting assumes. There are more complex, more complete ways of seeing the relationship between rhetor, message, and audience. And on the web, it helps to think of audience as active, productive, making choices at every turn.

One way of exploring this alternative conception of the more sophisticated moves audiences can make is to think about audience roles rather than audience identities.

In the particular

On entering a page, visitors are asked to play a role. The design, links, text, images all indicate and facilitate that role. The root question is, How does the design and the text define the visitor's role, and how do they facilitate visitors playing that role?

A site conceptualizes and projects a visitor in particular rather than general ways:

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

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

Particular rather than universal

We saw how sites ascribe roles to visitors when we looked at the BSU and the SCSU sites. The role the visitor was cast in - Prospective Student - was not general, not a matter of a Universal Prospective Student. Instead, the Prospective Student was cast in a particular way on a particular university's site.

For BSU, the rhetor on the Prospective Student pages was a benevolent guardian of your future. You saw this in the use of lists (rather than extended prose), in the tone of the lists, what was mentioned on the lists, the images on the pages...

And a benevolent guardian of your future implicitly casts the visiting prospective student in the the role of appreciative receiver of that guardianship. Again, we can get particular about this role by looking at the page and prose to see what Appreciative Receiver means in this case

• appreciative of outdoors - indeed, everything that's offered: the lake, the learning...
• polite, listens intently
• calm, relaxed - that image of the lake
• ordered and organized, like the lists offered
• reads casually and carefully - again, the lists suggest this
• well-dressed and well-behaved, as the images suggests
• ...

Notice, too, that the rhetor has design the page and the text to help the visitor play the role of appreciatve receiver.

What are BSU Prospective Students given to play the role they are cast in? The lists and the images mentioned, but also a neatly organized set of links to information to consider, and admission criteria. These are the main links off the page, a set of links that the appreciative receiver can make use of, is expected to make use of:

• First Year Information (FYI)
• Educational Resources
• Estimated Costs
• Information for High School Counselors
• Information for Parents
• Meet Our Staff
• Prospective Student Timeline
• Scholarships
• Admissions Criteria

Prospective Students BSU

• http://www.bemidjistate.edu/admissions/prospects.asp
• http://www.bemidjistate.edu/admissions/freshmen.asp

On the SCSU site, you characterized the speaker as a Marketing Guy, a high energy presenter. The Prospective Student for SCUS is the Marketing Guy's mirror: energetic, fast moving... Again, look to the page, the layout, the text, the images. The SCSU Prospective Student is

• excited
• excitable
• social in groups
• reads fast and shoots off
• ...

The role cast for the Prospective Student at SCSU is to follow leads to their pages where he or she can

• take a tour
• find a roommate (Roommate quest)
• find a major
• visit the staff

and, at the bottom of the page

• "Apply to SCSU right here, right now!" (And the Ideal Prospective Student at SCSU is going to catch the allusion to Fatboy Slim).

And now it become worth noting that Lindsay's imperatives are at work on this page. They are the language of the Marketing Guy (Just Do It!) more than the listmaking benefactor (Consider these points to see if we fit.)

Prospective Students SCSU

• http://www.stcloudstate.edu/prospective/default.asp
• http://www.stcloudstate.edu/scsu4u/

So, in looking at the relationship between the rhetor and visitor, we can look at

• what roles visitors are cast in
• what elements on the pages indicate this role
• what they are given to play that role

A rough but useful way of starting this analysis this is to ask "How can I characterize the rhetor on this page or cluster of pages?" and "Who, then, is the ideal visitor for this page or cluster of pages?" Once you can characterize rhetor and visitor, and ground those characteristics in the particular elements on the page, you can move to analysing how the page works rhetorically.

Making the next move - the evaluative - is going to depend on what we're interested in. Marketing people might ask how successful the page is in assigning the role by seeing if their enrollment increases. Or they might be interested in evaluating the page to see how the role cast for the Prospective Student lines up with the kind of students they wish to enroll.

Target audience: St. Sebastian: patron saint of archers and soldiers

Categories: Lecture, Audience, Exercise