audience

A lot of us use this phrase in our everyday language—that is probably not the case with phrases like “rhetorical situation.” The OED defines it primarily as the people who watch a performance: the word comes from the Latin verb “to hear.” For us, of course, audience includes people who consume various kinds of texts and not just live performances. Bitzer (1968) adds a bit by describing an audience as the participants in a rhetorical situation. I think it’s worth complicating this idea a little. The first three complications here come from my reading of Jim Gee’s (2007) thinking about the identities of learners. He might encourage us to think about

• real-world audience. The people who do read or view or otherwise consume some text.
• virtual audience. People who can play a member of a real-world audience of some text.
• projective audience. People who try out playing the member of a real-world audience in order to learn something.
• intended audience. The audience for which a text is composed. This audience might be limited to an actual group or the people the designer has in mind for the text or the people who already consume the sort of text that the designer has created. Let’s call this the primary audience. Sometimes designers have secondary audiences in mind; sometimes they don’t.

Writers identify audiences and write for them, and texts and rhetorical activity create audiences. I suspect that figuring out how to compose in a new context involves thinking about the relationship of an audience to a text and to a body of content from inside that audience and from outside that audience. From the inside of some group that is used to making meaning together, an audience looks mostly like people getting access to content. Audiences look different from the outside of that group. When someone who doesn’t use Facebook watches someone scroll through a Facebook feed, she likely notices a person engaged in a social practice, making particular facial expressions and hand gestures and moving through content in particular ways.

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