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Who am I this time?

Focusing on writer / audience relations.

See ConceptionsOfAudience

On entering a web 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 an audience in particular rather than general ways:

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

In short, it's a matter of Who is speaking? To whom? And what relation is being established by writer towards reader about the subject?

From a reader's perspective, it's a question of Who am I this time? What role am I being asked to play? And how is the writer enabling me to play that role?

Compare Prospective Student pages on two university sites

These pages are intended to be read by prospective students - but consider how the pages define / project that student.

• what roles do they define for the student?
• what does he or she value, desire, want as a student?
• what kind of place is this campus depicted as?
• what's not represented, and who's not represented

An exercise

Characterize the speaker/designer of the page, characterize the kind of place the university is represented as, and characterize the student implied by that speaker/designer.

To do so, look at and pin your analysis to these elements:

Prose

Stance is created by a balance between subject, interests of audience, and ethos/voice of speaker. For our purposes, we can characterize stances by considering tone and attitude towards subject and towards the audience.

• sarcasm, neutrality, solemnity; formality and informality; pedant, entertainer, advertiser; buddy, pal, confidant; colleague; parent, teacher....

Images

• who and what are they of? shot at what angle? characterize them. what is not being represented?

Links

• what's made available and what's not: where can the reader go next? where am is the reader being encouraged to go? how are the links presented: sidebar? in text?
• what's missing?

Assume a balcony stance and focus on description and analysis rather than evaluation.

Proceed in two stages. First, look at Prospective Students

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

and

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

and then the Incoming Freshman / Undergrad Admissions pair

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

and

• http://www.stcloudstate.edu/scsu4u/

Workspaces

• GroupA?
• GroupB?
• GroupC?
• GroupD?
• GroupE?

Categories: Lecture, Audience, Exercise