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Audience is arguably the most central concept in the fields of rhetoric and tech comm. What have theorists been asking about audience from centuries ago up until the modern day, when social media has exploded the reach and interactivity of audiences? What does the evolution of audience mean for technical and professional communicators? And what is the best episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000? Books discussed include Involving the Audience by Lee-Ann Breuch and Update Culture by John Gallagher.
Sources and further reading
- Asante, M. (2011). Afrocentric Idea Revised. Temple University Press.
- Bakke, A. (2019). Trust-building in a patient forum: The interplay of professional and personal expertise. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 49(2), 156–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047281618776222
- Breuch, L.-A. K. (2018). Involving the audience: A rhetorical perspective on using social media to improve websites. Routledge.
- Brizee, A. (2015). Using Isocrates to Teach Technical Communication and Civic Engagement. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 45(2), 134–165. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047281615569481
- Collins, D. F. (2001). Audience in Afrocentric Rhetoric. Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition, 185.
- Dayton, D. (2003). Audiences involved, imagined, and invoked: Trends in user-centered interactive information design. Professional Communication Conference, 2003. IPCC 2003. Proceedings. IEEE International, 9-pp.
- Dik-dik. (2022). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dik-dik&oldid=1077493803
- Gallagher, J. R. (2020). Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. University Press of Colorado.
- Houser, R. (1997). What is the value of audience to technical communicators? A survey of audience research. Proceedings of IPCC 97. Communication, 155–166. https://doi.org/10.1109/IPCC.1997.637043
- Ede, L., & Lunsford, A. (1984). Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy. College Composition and Communication, 35(2), 155–171. https://doi.org/10.2307/358093
- Johnson, R. R. (2004). Audience involved: Toward a participatory model of writing. Central Works in Technical Communication, 91–103.
- Mallon, J. (1994, September 17). The Creeping Terror. In Mystery Science Theater 3000.
- Munroe, R. (n.d.). Duty Calls. Xkcd. Retrieved March 29, 2022, from https://xkcd.com/386/
- Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1973). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. University of Notre Dame Pess.
- Plato. (2003). Phaedrus. Hackett Publishing.
- Schriver, K. A. (1997). Dynamics in document design: Creating text for readers. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
- Whitburn, M. (2000). Rhetorical scope and performance: The example of technical communication. Greenwood Publishing Group.
- Wilkins, N. (n.d.). Bay Breeze Cocktail Recipe. Make Me a Cocktail. Retrieved March 29, 2022, from https://makemeacocktail.com/cocktail/6753/bay-breeze/
Transcript
| A | I’m Abi, I’m a professor of technical communication and rhetoric, |
| B | and I am Benton. I’m not. |
| A | But you are a science-minded civilian. That’s not the right word. |
| B | Citizen, that’s the one you’re looking for. |
| A | Non-academic. I come on here, I talk about my field, what I’m reading, and I attempt to make it interesting for Benton. And he makes the whole thing more interesting for everyone. |
| B | At least I hope so. |
| A | We are TC talk, by the way, |
| B | we are tc talk. |
| A | All right. I want to play a game. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | I’m calling this game name the drink. And by name, I don’t mean identify, I mean, invent a name for this cocktail. |
| B | I need to try it again then. |
| A | I’ll tell you the ingredients. Vodka, cranberry juice, pineapple juice. |
| B | Sweet and sewer. |
| A | Gross. It’s not that bad. |
| B | No, it’s, it’s tasty. The color though is not appealing. Pretty much like cloudy brown water. |
| A | Okay. This is a real drink. The real name is a sea breeze cocktail or bay breeze actually, |
| B | Bay Breeze, |
| A | which sounds quite a bit nicer than yours. |
| B | Yeah. |
| A | Your turn. So either give me an ingredient list and I’ll name the cocktail, or give me a name and I’ll tell you what would go into it. I should note, our invented drinks don’t need to taste good. |
| B | Okay. A Mount Doom. |
| A | Nice. |
| B | Fireball. |
| A | Oh, yes, it would be fireball whiskey. I was thinking absinthe because wasn’t it thought to be poisonous at one point or in large quantities? |
| B | Well it’s fermented wormwood. |
| A | It definitely needs Mountain Dew for the mixer. |
| B | You nailed that one. |
| A | Mountain Dew, fireball whiskey and absinthe. All right. Now you tell me the ingredients for a dog’s breakfast. |
| B | Dog’s breakfast, huh? Boy, that’s a tough one. Rum, say spiced rum. |
| A | I have a history with spiced rum. |
| B | I know you do. You know what a dog’s breakfast is? |
| A | You want to tell the audience just so we’re all on the same page. |
| B | About your history with spiced rum? |
| A | No! |
| B | Oh. |
| A | That can never leave this room. Nor can it leave the library. |
| B | Right. |
| A | No. Tell the audience what a dog’s breakfast means as a saying. |
| B | Yes. So a dog’s breakfast is a figure speech describing a mess, a haphazard. |
| A | That should be easy then. Just list off anything you can think of. It doesn’t need to have any rhyme or reason. |
| B | Grenadine. |
| A | The breakfast theme. |
| B | Shot of espresso, yes. |
| A | Orange juice, champagne. |
| B | Yes. |
| A | That does sound like a dog’s breakfast. Thank you for humoring me. |
| B | In fact, it is one of my great pursuits to humor you. |
| A | I mean, you won’t, you refuse to sing a round with me. |
| B | I’ve got a, it’s got to be a really special |
| A | Row, row, row your boat. |
| B | Stop. I’m giving you the Sauron eye. |
| A | Hand me a Mount Doom already because I’m getting the Sauron look. |
| B | I see you. It’s gotta be a special occasion for me to participate. |
| A | To deign to participate in singing a round with me. Very well. You do not know what our topic is today. |
| B | Nah I don’t know. |
| A | I’m going to quiz you a little bit. What would you say? Oh, I need to cover up my my notes here so you can’t cheat. |
| B | As you wish. |
| A | Where’s my folder? So I can make a little |
| B | Oh, I see. |
| A | protective stand |
| B | I thought that was the first question. Just like |
| A | The theme of our podcast today, where is Abi’s folder, |
| B | I was like, is this another Middle Earth reference in that you’re pulling a Bilbo with Gollum. What have I got in my pocket? |
| A | Or as Socrates would say, is that a scroll in your pocket or are you just happy to see me. It’s in the first part of the Phaedrus, I’m not kidding you. Although most translations tend to tone down the innuendo. |
| B | One of the earliest fallacies. |
| A | Again, just leaning into that unprofessionalism. What would you guess is potentially the single most important idea to the fields of rhetoric and technical communication? When I tell you what it is, you’ll be like, Oh, of course. Audience. |
| B | Oh, of course. |
| A | What is the first image you get in your mind when you hear the word audience. Like if you had to turn it into like a concrete picture of something, what would it be? |
| B | Audience makes me think of someone coming before the king in a medieval court, having an audience with the king. |
| A | Oh. I was thinking of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The setup is, we’ve got our main characters, the robots. |
| B | Tom servo, who looks like a gumball machine, Croooow. |
| A | Who are watching a B movie. |
| B | I think in most cases it’s like a C or D movie in honesty, |
| A | The worse the movie the better. Because what they do is, so it’s like they’re silhouettes kind of framed around the, the bad movie. And then they just make jokes about it the whole time. And then it’s gone through a few hosts. |
| B | It has, it started with Mike Nelson. |
| A | You told me before that it started in Minnesota? |
| B | Yes. |
| A | That’s cool. What’s the best MST3K? |
| B | Hobgoblins was a good one. |
| A | You’re forgetting the creeping terror. |
| B | The creeping terror is phenomenal. It’s very good. |
| A | The one where the guy ineffectually attacks the giant alien with a guitar. |
| B | Instead of running away. It is a creeping terror, not a running terror. |
| A | and how the victims literally climb into its mouth because they had such a low budget. |
| B | I’ve never eaten a whole prom before. |
| A | Okay. Yeah. So that to me is like a literalization of audience. Or I think of throwing tomatoes at the actors in a play. So what’s interesting about the way I think of audience in all those examples is that they are heckling or throwing fruit or ridiculing whatever it is they’re watching. Also, it’s either a live performance. |
| B | or a recorded thing. |
| A | Right. So audiences of writing did not come to mind for me right away. Which is interesting because of all people you’d think a writing professor would think of that. But my sort of first conception of audience does match with the earliest senses of audience. Which is |
| B | people watching a play. |
| A | You are watching or dialoguing with a real person. Not that audiences of writing aren’t real, but I mean, like flesh and blood, in your face. |
| B | That sounds like an uncomfortable experience. Agh. |
| A | What is this, the final scene of Jaws? |
| B | Maybe. |
| A | So I thought what I would do today is give us a little tour of the notion of audience through time. And bringing us up to date with what do audiences mean for professional communicators? Now, technical communication is a relatively new field, but it links back to ancient rhetorical theory. And that stretches back centuries. In the field of rhetorical theory a big question has been, what is the audience? How important is the audience, and what is its relationship to other aspects of the rhetorical situation. Rhetorical situation being this combination of things that come together when communication is happening. There’s a writer or a speaker, an audience, a context. There’s the actual text itself or speech itself. Those all form the rhetorical situation. Now when I say rhetorical theory, I’m referring largely to the Western rhetorical tradition, which has its limits and problems. For better or for worse it is the foundation of a lot of how we think of rhetoric today. I’m not going to get into the specifics, but |
| B | Besides the Western conception, what else is there? |
| A | I’m going to get to it, |
| B | Okay, good. |
| A | At least some of it. A lot of this rhetorical thinking emerged out of ancient Greece. What were the conditions there that made rhetoric flourish? What do you think? |
| B | The whole participatory democracy thing was kind of important. You know, there was that there’s a sense of equality imbued in that so that everyone can feel like they have a voice that matters. |
| A | Everyone, of course, meaning |
| B | males, of course. Males who have a chance to leave the fields for lovely public discourse on things. |
| A | The extent to which it was truly democratic is certainly questionable. But compared to decisions being made strictly by |
| B | the monarch, |
| A | the nobility or |
| B | despot. |
| A | Religious leaders, it was a change. It suddenly mattered that people had the tools to communicate, make a case for something, perhaps defend themselves in court. And also in that context, you can see how rhetoric would take on kind of an agonistic vibe. Agonistic meaning conflict, fight, debate. There’s a winner and a loser. I think it’s also fair to say that a lot of that has persisted. |
| B | Where do you get that idea, the news? |
| A | The role of audience during these times was pretty distanced from the speaker. Was sort of this mass of people who you could analyze psychologically and craft a message to get the results you wanted. So the audience wasn’t especially involved. Yet, say, Aristotle’s conception of audience may not have been the best known at that time in ancient Greece. Have you ever heard of Isocrates? |
| B | I would never have heard of Isocrates, if not for you going on and on about Isocrates, |
| A | When have I gone on and on about Isocrates? |
| B | Isocrates this and Isocrates that and |
| A | Isocrates, You-socrates, |
| B | We all Socrates for dialogue? |
| A | He was a contemporary of Plato and Aristotle. Like I said, he was better known at the time. He was viewed as a sophist by our more famous Greek friends. When you hear the word sophistry, what is that word meant to convey, do you think? |
| B | Sophistry seems to me to be embodied in Jim Carrey’s character in the movie, Liar, Liar. |
| A | Ooh. |
| B | That is who he was. |
| A | He was a Sophist. |
| B | He was a sophist. He was there to try and convince you that his blue pen is red. Until his son makes some mystical wish that makes him unable to lie. |
| A | You can thank Plato for that reputation that sophists have to this day. |
| B | Platonic propaganda. |
| A | Right, I mean, he was stealing their business. So sophistry was more associated with relativism, contingency, civic engagement versus philosophy and ultimate truth and exact knowledge, which is more in line with Plato’s thinking. In fact, it’s from Isocrates that we get the idea of kairos. |
| B | What is Kairos? |
| A | Saying the right thing at the right time. Isocrates may not have spoken explicitly about what the audience is or what their role is. But reading between the lines, we can see that audience was thought of more actively. As Alan Brizzee writes, this more relativistic approach “asks the rhetor to consider contextual information such as culture and audience to develop communication.” This can lead to more engagement with the actual members of the audience versus just talking at them. Now, because I love some drama. |
| B | Ooh, |
| A | Let’s dig into this supposed rivalry between Isocrates and Plato. |
| B | I’ll get my popcorn. And a popcorn meme. |
| A | The pigeon with the binoculars meme, that’s you. Okay, Merrill Whitburn writes, “Ancient Athens was clearly a hotbed of academic competition with feverish posturing for competitive edge.” |
| B | Wow. |
| A | The Sophists and the philosophers “were engaged in a major battle for academic supremacy.” I was curious how much of this rivalry is real and how much of it is inferred. And it looked like they were kind of sub tweeting each other more so than like outright fisticuffs in the street kind of deal. Plato for instance, he didn’t necessarily call out Isocrates by name, but indirectly referred to him unfavorably in one of his dialogues. Do you want to know why Western history has gone awry? |
| B | I have wanted to know why all my life. |
| A | Merrill Whitburn has the answer. And it’s that we didn’t listen to Isocrates. “What has become clear is that improving our lives in many respects is contingent on reversing a trend that received its greatest impetus from a struggle between Isocrates on the one hand, and Plato and Aristotle on the other some 24 centuries ago. In the very cradle of civilization, Western history began going awry and has continued on that path ever since” |
| B | All these last 2400 years. |
| A | Do you want to know what has had the greatest adverse impact on the emergence and development of technical communication in the 20th century, according to Merrill Whitburn? |
| B | Yes. |
| A | Plato and Aristotle. In fact, he has a chapter all about corporate irresponsibility. He was writing in the Reagan era of deregulation. And attributes this problem to practitioners of technical writing not having the Isocratean tradition to draw from, which would’ve helped them pull their heads out of the clouds of philosophical contemplation of what is when they needed to be ethically deliberating about what ought to be. |
| B | Those last two questions you asked me definitely made it seem like to Merrill Whitburn the world was full of Platonic nails and Isocrates was a hammer. |
| A | Yes. |
| B | Which would be a great named for a philosopher’s band. |
| A | Cocktail. What would an Isocratean Hammer consist of? It would make sense for a recipe for an Isocratean Hammer to not consist of absolutes. Like it’s not two ounces this 1.5 ounces that, it would be whatever ratio is most fitting to the situation at the time. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | I do really enjoy the Whitburn book though. He just puts it out there. He’s got opinions. Plus it’s a nice summary of the gist of the various philosophies. I would recommend it if only, if only for the drama. So yes, even in ancient Athens itself, there were competing conceptions of audience. But there’s a world beyond Greece. |
| B | In a world beyond Greece, |
| A | I cannot cover them all here, but I do want to bring up one that I found especially interesting and useful, and that’s Afrocentric rhetoric. |
| B | Do tell. |
| A | This comes from an essay by Daniel Collins published in an edited collection, Alternative Rhetorics from 2001. He compares Western to Afrocentric rhetoric. And obviously this involves making some generalizations. The idea is that we don’t have to start from just one assumption about how to relate to our audiences. Quoting from Molefi Asante’s book, the Afrocentric Idea. “Rhetoric in an Afrocentric sense, is the productive thrust of language into the unknown in an attempt to create harmony and balance in the midst of disharmony and indecision.” Whereas Western rhetoric has that agonistic bent. |
| B | Western rhetoric is the rhetoric of conquest. Afrocentric rhetoric is a rhetoric of cooperation. |
| A | Yeah, I mean, not that I want to reduce it down to these single ideas, but if you were to capture the distinction, I think that’s a great way to put it. “Afrocentric rhetoric frames the individual in relation to the collective.” Versus in Western rhetoric which sort of pits a rhetor against the audience and success depends on excluding other viewpoints versus bringing more viewpoints in and collectively refining them. I’m guilty of falling back on thinking of argument in terms of a debate. My students, that is often what they have learned all through school. So I have tried to open up that idea in my own classes and I’d like to share one activity that I think interrupted the argument as conflict framing. |
| B | Oh, okay. |
| A | First I showed a YouTube video. It wasn’t particularly controversial though, because I didn’t want it to get people upset. So it was something kind of mundane, like smart phones are better for society. I don’t know. And as a class, we tried to sum up the thesis statement of the video. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | Not establishing is this view correct or not, but just can we summarize the argument being made, being made here as fairly as possible. So then I asked everybody to pair up. And then half of the pairs were assigned to agree with that thesis statement and come up with supporting reasons. |
| B | I see where this is going. |
| A | And the other half of the, of the groups were assigned to disagree with the thesis statement. Where do you think this is going? |
| B | I thought that you are going to finish up with, in the Western tradition, death match. Fight it out. But then you surprised them by saying, okay, switch spots. First half take the second position. Second half take the first position. |
| A | No, I didn’t do that. |
| B | What? |
| A | What I did is I had one member of each group stand up and shuffle over to the next person. Speed dating style, so that now the pairs were remixed so that there was one pro and one con paired up. But then what I said, and here I’m quoting from my class plan, which I had to dig up. “Share your ideas with each other. The goal is not to persuade your partner that your perspective is better. The goal is to listen to each other, consider the best of both perspectives, and see if together you can identify a more nuanced, accurate claim about this topic.” And I had a couple of caveats. First, respect each other as people, yes. But it’s a cop out to say all perspectives are equally valid. Because when it comes to like a smartphone, it’s not that high of stakes, but there are other things where |
| B | Belief systems. |
| A | some opinions are just objectively |
| B | Trashy. |
| A | hateful and should not be entertained. And then the other thing I said is that the goal is not even necessarily to compromise. At least if you think of a compromise as a point that’s exactly equidistant from both perspectives. |
| B | Right. |
| A | And I even did math. The one and only time I’ve ever done math on the whiteboard and I did it wrong on purpose. If person A says two plus two equals four and person B says two plus two equals six, then the correct answer isn’t five. After that, we reflected on what was it like to approach argument in this more collaborative way versus in the pro and con way. And students had really good reflections about it. Any listeners out there, if this is something you want me to like, write up for you and send along, I would be totally happy to do that. |
| B | Magnanimous of you. |
| A | Another big shift in thinking about audience came along with writing because you don’t have that flesh and blood in your face anymore. |
| B | Yeah. It’s a lot cleaner. |
| A | Much more distanced. Plato took issue with that, but we don’t need to get into that. |
| B | Socrates took major issue with that, right? |
| A | Well, Socrates never actually put his own stuff in writing. So Plato was Socrates’ mouthpiece, so it’s hard to know how much of it is actually Socrates so much, you know, needless to say, Plato would be the guy whose |
| B | Ah you kids these days and your bookface, your whatnot have your electric Internet thingamajiggers. |
| A | Yes. Exactly. So when you are writing versus speaking in front of a crowd, your idea of audience is |
| B | decoupled from |
| A | by nature like not a real audience, it’s in your brain. Skip ahead to the 1960s. We have Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric, What’s new about their rhetoric? You ask? |
| B | What is new about their rhetoric? I ask. |
| A | Well, they complicated the idea of audience quite a bit. I wouldn’t say that they made an explicit case for giving the audience more agency or what have you. But they did talk about things like the starting point of argument is agreement, which I love because it means if you’re arguing with someone, focus on what is the common ground that you share and kind of work up from there. |
| B | Hm. |
| A | And they introduced ideas like a composite audience, which acknowledges that audiences of a piece of writing are not homogenous and they may have competing values and competing goals. Particular audiences versus universal audiences, which is in theory an audience of all reasonable people. And I’ll be honest, I have never quite understood what they mean by this. Do they actually believe there is such a thing as |
| B | A reasonable person? |
| A | Precisely. Or is it more a writer’s conception of what an audience of it? I don’t know. 1984 Ede and Lunsford wrote a widely cited piece in composition studies called Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked. They essentially gave labels to these two ideas of audience that a writer or retire must keep in mind. There’s the imagined audience, |
| B | The invoked one. |
| A | And they write here, rather than relying on incantations, writers conjure their vision of an audience. |
| B | Clever. |
| A | Although I kind of like the idea of |
| B | summoning an audience through paranormal means. |
| A | You know, that could be my next article. Writing for a paranormal audience. |
| B | Written by Abi Normal. Thank you Young Frankenstein for that. |
| A | It’s Young Frankenstein. |
| B | Frankenstein. That’s right. |
| A | And then the audience addressed is the literal people. Their whole thing is that you shouldn’t emphasize one over the other. Think of how they work together. |
| B | That difference between audience invoked an audience addressed. It would be really interesting to look at persuasion. Say you’re talking about one of the great pivotal speeches in history, like what comes to mind for me being a space nut is JFK’s address to Rice University where he said “we go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” I know that a lot of what happened in the 60s has been rewritten historically in terms of how popular and how obvious it was at the time. Martin Luther King Junior was, or he had an 18 percent approval rating by the public at the time. NASA up until the moon landing was probably right about there as well. But they just, they had the funding because it was a military slash geopolitical priority. |
| A | Cold War. |
| B | Cold War. In the case of that where clearly the speaker is trying to persuade, is the invoked audience, what you imagine the audience is, and therefore needs to be persuaded from, to something else? Or is that invoked audience what you want your audience to end up as? |
| A | That is such a good question. Are you invoking an ideal audience? Or are you invoking a realistic audience? Is that kind of what you’re getting at? |
| B | Yes. |
| A | I think it’s a mix of both because there has to be that recognition that you do want to move the audience from point A to point B. Possibly what JFK was doing in that moment, was constructing a role for his audience. It, it kind of appeals to like the American values of independence and innovation. And I was not aware of that context that you just shared. That there was not a lot of public support behind going to the moon. |
| B | Oh no. I’m not deifying JFK because he had his personal and political blunders to be absolutely certain. That level of inspirational speech I don’t think has come back to the White House since he died. |
| A | Inspiration, that’s exactly the right word for it. He was speaking to them as though, of course, you want to be the kind of person who cares about taking on these challenges. And in that sense, his speech was in part epideictic or epideictic. |
| B | In the middle of a dik-dik? |
| A | On top of a dik-dik. Epi, above. And a dik-dik, meaning a small African deer. |
| B | Look them up. Adorbs. Sorry. |
| A | Okay. Back to ancient Greece to explain epideictic rhetoric. It was one of three main modes of rhetoric, the others being deliberative or deciding what to do in the future. So policy. Another was forensic or judicial, kind of deciding what happened. |
| B | The past. |
| A | Right. And then epideictic is the rhetoric of praise and blame. So you would hear that at things like eulogies or celebrating a military victory or something. What it’s doing is it’s appealing to cultural values. |
| B | In the present. |
| A | Good catch. Deliberative, future, judicial, past, epideictic, present. |
| B | Nailed it. |
| A | Did you platonically nail it though? Let me get out my Isocratean hammer. Epideictic is not overtly persuasive in the ways that the other types of rhetoric are. But what they are doing is they’re kind of cementing values that can then be appealed to, to persuade later on, perhaps. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | And I think that’s probably what was going on with the JFK speech. Do you agree? |
| B | Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. He was lifting up these values of service and duty, |
| A | and he was asking his audience to rise to that challenge. Anyway |
| B | It definitely has the feel of the encouraging coach. |
| A | The locker room pep talk. Yeah. There’s another article, the locker room pep talk as epideictic rhetoric. |
| B | There you go. |
| A | You can have that idea for free. Run with it. |
| B | Oh listener. Or me? I can write that article? |
| A | But don’t write an article about locker room talk because that has an entirely different connotation. So Ede and Lunsford brought us audience invoked, audience addressed. In 1997 Johnson brings us audience involved and this was one of the first efforts to really theorize audience in the field of technical communication. |
| B | Hm. |
| A | So he connected it really closely to usability, which we’ve talked about before. What’s your one-sentence summary of usability? |
| B | Whether you can use it. How a thing made by somebody with their invoked audience in mind is actually experienced by the |
| A | addressed audience. |
| B | Addressed audience. |
| A | But what usability brings into the picture is that it’s not just a matter of hearing or reading something, but with much technical communication, people are interacting with it. They’re using it to aid them in accomplishing something. According to Johnson, “Audience Theory historically has been central to technical communication. The very nature of technical communication begs for conceptions of audience because technical writers are fundamentally charged with the responsibility of translating information from one context to another. As a result of this responsibility, it should be no surprise that technical communicators advocated the importance of audience long before composition theorists showed interest in audience in the 1970s.” |
| B | Cool. |
| A | Again, I’m going to be here for the shade. Johnson introduces the idea of audience involved. Users who collaborate on something with writers. So they’re not just the end-user, but they’re brought into the process of creating that documentation or that product. |
| B | And it was 97 when he? |
| A | Yep. |
| B | Interesting, so 97 is pre-Google, but it is not pre-internet. |
| A | No, and it’s not pre microcomputers. |
| B | Right. Did Johnson have an eye towards the Internet as like a place where this audience involved tech comm was happening? |
| A | Probably, I don’t know. |
| B | He would have been, he would have been on the ball. |
| A | Here’s something he said. He defines users, “those audiences we literally work with as we produce everything from reports and instructions to online help and World Wide Web sites” with each w capitalised. So, yeah. And he is calling communicators to recognize the knowledge that users bring to a situation. Instead of thinking in terms of idiot’s guide to blah, like what is it that audiences bring to an interaction with technology and how can you build on that to make something more usable. Here I’ll interject with an example of what it looks like to have an audience involved in a usability test. Because I have my students do that in my classes. Mostly they just like setup different stations around the room with their instructions and their materials. And then people just kinda wander around. And if somebody needs a usability test and no one else is free, I’ll sometimes hop in. There was one time where somebody wrote instructions for how to take a screenshot using a PC. And as you know, I use a Mac. I could not make the thing do a fucking screenshot. I’m not stupid. I would hope. |
| B | No. |
| A | But it was a great experience for the students to see me struggling with that because it helped them realize, oh, we are assuming that our audience is used to a Windows operating system, |
| B | Windows literacy. |
| A | You get enough different users to test something out and you see how do we need to fill in the blanks or word this differently, et cetera. Also in 1997, we get an article from Houser who talks about how a technical communicator kind of oscillates between an imagined and addressed audience throughout the process. So you always have to start with your own assumptions. Putting it on paper gives us a chance to kind of challenge that conception and hopefully replace unconscious stereotypes we may be holding with data informed details gleaned from user research. Learn about what their contexts and needs and goals are. Then you update your vision of audience. You create something, have real users use it, refine, so on and so forth. In technical communication there’s traditionally been kind of three main approaches to learning about your audiences. And this comes from Shriver. There’s classification driven, which is more analyzing the demographics of your audience. Sure it’s useful, but it’s not comprehensive. There’s intuition which is based on the writer’s previous experience with audiences. And then there’s feedback-driven, such as the usability testing or observing people use the products or the documentation. These methods for learning about audience, one informs the other, and you kind of cycle through these different approaches and that’s fine. 2003 then, Dayton comes along and argues that the audience addressed, audience invoked, and audience involved can be combined using storytelling methods. This comes from UX, user experience. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | And the specific storytelling methods he’s talking about are personas and scenarios. Personas are kind of profiles of maybe a representative audience member. It’s drawn from real data about users. So you don’t want to just have it be fully invented. But it also needs to be specific enough that it helps the design team really focus on how real people are going to respond. Scenarios then are situations in which somebody would be using a certain technology. And so those methods cut across all three audience types. And I like this, he says, “to try out the new storytelling paradigm, such practitioners would only need to start writing more like novelists and less like engineers in composing their user profiles and use cases.” |
| B | I take offense to that. |
| A | Well, yeah, because you’re a soulless technician. |
| B | You’re dreaming aesthete. Callback. |
| A | Just like the advent of writing changed conceptions of audience, so did the advent of technology, the internet, computers. Now I don’t mean to make it sound like it was snap your fingers and there’s this technological revolution, this happens gradually. Nonetheless, it gives theorists some work to do to figure out how does this change our audience theories and how does the presence of digital audiences change the work of writers. |
| B | I did want to jump in when you said the advent of technology, like all of a sudden, we have technology. |
| A | Yeah. You caught me. I was using that as a shorthand for digital technologies, but of course, a pen and pencil are technologies, a papyrus and whatever they used to write on papyrus with is a technology. |
| B | You whippersnappers and your technology. |
| A | There’s a whole sub-field that studies this exact question. Digital rhetoric. |
| B | Oh. |
| A | So I want to highlight a couple of books that show how digital audiences change writing and writers. The first book is by Lee-Ann Breuch. It’s called Involving the Audience, A Rhetorical Perspective on Using Social Media to Improve Websites. And the second one is by John Gallagher, Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. We’ll start with Breuch’s book. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | This was from 2019. She’s writing this to an audience of usability specialists and technical communicators involved in creating usable websites. And she’s saying that there’s this whole wealth of information we can get about user experience from social media that we are currently not using. |
| B | A whole wealth of it, you say. |
| A | Indeed, she did a case study actually of the rollout of the MNSure website in 2013, that was a result of the passing of the Affordable Care Act. Do you remember the promotions around MNSure, that website where people who didn’t have insurance could go and theoretically shop for different options and get coverage. |
| B | I do. |
| A | Do you remember the Paul Bunyan ads, they put a lot of money into promoting this. And it was a cute campaign, you know, Paul Bunyan, Minnesota, situations where Paul Bunyan needs health care. |
| B | Oh, no, I chopped off my foot, curses. |
| A | Something like that. Yes. So MNSure was this large, complex website and people struggled with it immediately and it was deemed a failure at the start. |
| B | And that was partially because of IT issues, capacity. |
| A | Bad organization. |
| B | Bad organization. |
| A | So what Lee-Ann Breuch did in her study, she looked at hundreds of comments that people posted on Twitter, Facebook, comments on blog posts and newspaper articles about MNSure. She searched relevant hashtags and analyzed those to find themes in the feedback. People were complaining, rightfully, they couldn’t even make an account or their progress wasn’t saved. Don’t you hate when that happens? |
| B | Ugh. |
| A | Or there were unclear instructions like, what does it mean to enter information for everyone in your household? Does that mean a family member? Do you have to dig up your roommate’s personal information? It just wasn’t clear. Ultimately, this wastes time. It wastes the organization’s time. It wastes, I mean, it materially hurt these families who couldn’t get coverage or who had to miss work to stay on hold on the helpline. |
| B | Oh boy. |
| A | And of course, this user experience affected people’s impressions of the whole thing. It’s interesting how she found different types of messages based on the platform. So on Twitter, she found a lot of more politically charged commentary, like the failure of MNSure points to the failure of the ACA, et cetera. So we’re not getting direct user experience there, but we’re getting impressions. And on the Facebook page, she found more problem-solving type comments. So people were coming on there and being in some cases very specific about their situations and their problems. In that sense, you’re getting kind of free personas and scenarios like I was talking about with the Dayton article. People are on social media telling stories about their user experience. Get this. They did no usability testing on this website before they rolled it out. Zero. How was that possible? |
| B | Deadlines. That would be my guess. We gotta get it up, just get it done, get it up, get it done, get it up. We’re behind schedule. Agh. Alright, it’s up. It’s down. |
| A | This case introduces a few interesting new twists when it comes to audience. Number 1, you could say the audience is more organic because you’re not going out and gathering up representative users and sitting them down in a lab and studying their experience. They’re the people who actually needed to use the tool to accomplish a thing. The stakes were much higher. |
| B | Yes, they completely forwent the, the user testing and so they didn’t have the curated, what you were talking about. Pretend that you are a user. And they went instead straight to live application. |
| A | Yes. |
| B | Field response. |
| A | The downside of organic audience is that that can include trolls and people who aren’t who they say they are. And of course, a social media audience is not representative of the full audience because people who are on social media have to have that much technological knowledge. But that is why, and Breuch emphasizes this repeatedly, this is a supplemental usability method, like this should not be your one and only way of learning about your audience. Not to mention it’s, it’s too late in the process. As far as problem-solving goes, this is absolutely something that we should be adding to our toolkit. |
| B | Yeah, You generally want to get as much revision done before version 1.0. |
| A | Yeah. Second, the audience is relatively immediate, at least compared to the amount of time, again, it would take to set up a usability study. And ideally, organizations would be set up to respond to these usability bugs that are emerging in the social media. Or in like maybe they set up a report a bug feature on their website or something. |
| B | Yeah, that would probably get overwhelmed and crash too. I could very easily see there being a pretty big structural separation between social media manager and head of IT. |
| A | So bridge that separation, absolutely. Cross-functional teams. |
| B | I could see like, Okay, we are launching. Now you are going to have daily meetings together so that there can be cross-pollination of learnings. Circle back on that cross-pollination and we’ll run it up the flagpole. |
| A | And yeah, so this relationship will obviously look different depending on the organization. That’s fine. Third, the audience initiates the feedback. Which is another difference from even Johnson’s idea of audience involved. Because with audience involved, the assumption is still the communicators are bringing in the audience. In this case, the audience is like, Hey, I’m here. I am involving myself, whether or not you want to hear from me. |
| B | I need to talk to someone. |
| A | And a challenge that comes with this for organizations is that this feedback is fully public. What effect is this barrage of complaints having on people’s impression of the organization? |
| B | From what I remember, I think that they were woefully understaffed. They were likely all very busy running around with their hair on fire. |
| A | Additionally, on, say, the Facebook page, the audience can be dialogued with. And so a lot of that amounted to, hey, send us an e-mail about the problem, understandably, but better than nothing. Interestingly, the MNSure situation had a happy ending. They exceeded their enrollment goal. They had to spend millions of dollars to find and fix the problems. And many of the identified problems were already showing up in the social media feedback. What does this mean for professional communicators? This is another responsibility of, say, a social media manager at a company, have someone there to directly respond to comments, kind of manage the audience. Ideally make proactive announcements when things are going wrong. Because then you can |
| B | And pin to top. |
| A | get ahead of, you know, a wave of complaints. Surprisingly, she says, there hasn’t been a lot of research on what we can learn about a site’s usability from audiences on social media. |
| B | Weird. |
| A | You know, take advantage of this and also read the full book. I just talked about one of the case studies she did. What Breuch is saying here is just that this is something you all need to look at, particularly when it comes to large, complex websites. And lastly, I want to talk about this Update Culture book by Gallagher, |
| B | The Afterlife of Digital Writing. Makes it sound so |
| A | Ghostly? |
| B | Spectral. |
| A | Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Listen to this. |
| B | I’m listening. |
| A | Afterlife studies for rhetoric, colon, writing for paranormal audiences. That was a call back. All joking aside, what he means by the afterlife of digital writing is that there is not an endpoint to digital writing. You can post, say, a blog post or an Amazon review or something on Reddit. But you’re not done. |
| B | How am I not done? I hit post. |
| A | On the internet there’s no final draft for digital writers who, you know, work to cultivate an audience. Often they have to continue to update, edit, discuss that initial writing. And as Gallagher points out, this requires a real shift in how we think about and teach the writing process. Over the years in writing studies, we’ve gotten a lot more sophisticated ways of thinking about writing process. That it’s not just outline, draft, revise, final, you know what I mean? Varies from person to person, it’s often recursive, et cetera. But Gallagher is arguing that we need to now account for that afterlife. |
| B | So the phrasing of afterlife of digital writing makes me think of this, in most cases, talking about people, afterlife is assumed to be something that is eternal and for all. Whereas, you know, like communication is |
| A | Ephemeral. |
| B | Ephemeral, made less so through the advances in technology, but still ephemeral to some extent. And so the afterlife is not infinite. |
| A | I hope not. I don’t want everything I post on the Internet to live eternally. |
| B | Don’t we all. |
| A | Not that I’m posting anything particularly salacious. |
| B | Don’t look too hard, folks. |
| A | I mean, I don’t think that’s what he was getting at. |
| B | Yeah, I know, but |
| A | It’s an implication that could be further explored. |
| B | It is an implication that could be further explored. |
| A | And I suppose that has implications for people who are writing not from their own space, but like writing for Amazon or Reddit. They have less control over |
| B | That too. |
| A | What happens to their writing. Again, I want to clarify, this isn’t some radical shift. As long as there has been writing, there has been response to that writing. But because of these new participatory technologies, the scope of writing and responding has just accelerated and expanded. So for his book, he interviewed a bunch of digital writers and came up with some big themes about what do these digital audiences mean for writing. I want to highlight just a couple that were interesting. Timing came into play here. The role of time in how writers publish and respond to readers. So don’t publish your post at 3AM when no one’s there to read it and to amplify it. |
| B | Ah, time of day. |
| A | Yes. Writers get pretty savvy about what are the best times of day to put this stuff out there. |
| B | Ideally, just before people jump on in the morning. |
| A | A lot of it is after work too, lunch hour. Or another kairotic moment to post would be posting the first review for an Amazon product. |
| B | Yes. Get in first. |
| A | Because that’s going to be the one that everybody sees and upvotes, and or rates as helpful, whatever. |
| B | I feel like a lot of comment sections are no longer organized chronologically. |
| A | Or you can choose how to order them. Like most recent versus most comments. |
| B | I’ve definitely seen, I’ve definitely seen on Twitter of back and forth of how long ago a thing was posted. And I don’t know if it depends on how many people you follow or, you know, how close the connections are to people you follow? Or how many likes this comment got? |
| A | Well, do you have it set to chronological or home? Because you have an option there. The default is home where they try to compile the stuff they think you want to see. |
| B | Oh. |
| A | But you can go in and set it to chronological. |
| B | Sneaky. |
| A | And then you see the kinds of stuff that otherwise can get buried. Yeah, So there we go. Defaults, they matter. And digital writers need to be attentive to those things. In rhetoric, time is often thought of in terms of kairos, which we talked about earlier from our friend Isocrates. Refresher, kairos represents timeliness, posting something or saying something at just the right time. And kairos is sort of a qualitative way of thinking about time. Interestingly, you can’t truly identify a kairotic moment until it has passed. You can’t plan to go viral, in other words. And it’s a huge burden for digital writers to constantly be on and kind of waiting to jump on those kairotic moments, right? So he talks about how to manage that, they develop consistent posting schedules. And so they kind of take this qualitative information about generally what are the good times to post. And then they kind of make it quantitative and decide I’m going to post at eight AM and 4 PM or whatever. That represents chronos, which is a Greek concept that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention in rhetorical theory. |
| B | Chronos. So rather than timeliness, time itself? |
| A | Clock time, quantitative time. And I want to give myself some props here because I alluded to chronos in one of my articles in like a footnote. I was talking about how participants in a patient forum build trust with each other. And one of the ways to do that was simply building a relationship over time. Sort of this accumulation of interactions that |
| B | Showing that you’re here regularly and for the long haul. |
| A | Yeah. |
| B | I agree that’s chronos. It isn’t kairos because |
| A | you could count the number of days somebody’s active on a forum, for instance. |
| B | You count the number of days somebody’s active on a forum and it doesn’t matter what time of day they’re doing it either. |
| A | Yeah. Last thing I want to mention, he talks about sort of the complex way that these writers engage with their audiences online. It’s not quite reading, it’s not simply writing. And his participants actually talked about it in terms of listening to their audience. They were kind of framing it as a conversation. So he said we need a better word for this process, this back and forth that writers engage in. It’s not that they’re reading their comments top to bottom, but it’s sort of an active process of filtering. And choosing how to respond to continue the conversation. And that could include strategically ignoring. I need more strategic ignoring in my life. |
| B | Of me? |
| A | Perhaps. Again, there’s way more going on in this book than what I’ve mentioned. And he argues that we need to account for all of the labor that goes into writing that continues after you hit post that first time. He acknowledges that this was hard for the writers. He writes quote, a pedagogy that addresses the afterlife of digital writing values the entire process of writing, including all the labor and time involved in attending to writing after it is published or put on the Internet. Oh, I forgot to do this. I want to show you the first page. |
| B | Yes. The XKCD comic, duty calls. Are you coming to bed? I can’t. This is important. Person sitting at the computer. What? Someone is wrong on the Internet! Banging away on their keyboard. One thing I love about comic is that is so relatable, like who has not gotten, who has not been that person at the keyboard, just like agh. |
| A | Yeah. I think it’s kind of alluding to that work-life balance thing too. I’m not going to bed. I gotta respond. And I’d like to see more extensions of this idea as well. I was thinking in terms of what could this mean for online teaching, for instance, managing a class discussion board. Why did I talk about this in tandem with Breuch’s involving the audience? I think both of these books show how living in the social media age has changed the work of writing, of professional writing and technical communication. It requires us to reorient ourselves to our audiences. Think about what it means for our professional roles. Requires us to think about and account for how active audiences truly are. Versus your traditional sage on the stage Athenian lecture, whatever, or as opposed to Crow and Tom Servo cracking jokes at a terrible movie. Any final thoughts about this evolution of audience in rhetoric and technical communication that I have attempted to portray? |
| B | Yes. Thoughts. |
| A | Besides what I’ve talked about, the real gap in the literature at this point is a careful theorization of spectral audiences, poltergeists and the like. Maybe I need to dig into that. |
| B | There is definitely some space for it. I don’t know if there’s any value to be added in that, but, |
| A | I appreciate that you said that. A gap in the research is not in and of itself a justification for research. What, have you been listening to my PhD methods professor? All right. I’m off to pour myself an Isocratean hammer, would you like one? |
| B | I Socratea company. |
| A | Maybe it’s like a Long Island iced tea. And so you could create a line of Isocrates. It’s too late. |
| B | Yeah. We can’t salvage that one. |