Audience as defined by mode

            My argument for defining audience is similar to my previous post where I explored how rhetoric is defined. In this entry I am trying to look less at overarching societal movements and more at a specific thing—modality. In looking at how audience is perceived it becomes obvious that the imagination is really what defines notion of who is listening. And more importantly is the idea that our imaginations can only perceive what we have witnessed and experienced. As we accumulate experiences (and add to our collective memory), the modes of communication become more diverse and the audience becomes more abstracted. Aristotle expands his binary view of active and passive audiences into an engaged audience—a product likely born of early democracy. Later, the indifference and scorn of the author is also explored in the work of literary artists (Porter 46). Perhaps the passage that best illustrates what I’m getting at here is when Porter says that the managerial view of rhetoric is “based on a telecommunications metaphor” that likens the rhetor-audience relationship to that of a telephone interaction.

            This is how audience is defined—by the communication techniques and technologies available at the time. Going back to Aristotle, it seems obvious that his view of audience would be shaped by the conversations, debates, and speeches of the time. Similarly, without the invention of the printing press and subsequently the fiction novel, the idea of indifference and scorn for an audience is nearly unthinkable. For a while scholars were able to draw distinctions between types of audience (as Covino and Joliffe outline in their explanation of primary and subsidiary audiences on page 12). The roles of rhetor and audience (though there were now more audiences) remained defined. That has obviously changed a great deal with the dawn of the digital age, namely web 2.0.

            Porter goes on to mention the postmodern concept of audience as it becomes quite a bit messier with communities being defined in more complex ways. This brings up the chicken-or-the-egg question from class the other day—does audience define the mode of communication or does the communication define the audience? In the age of social networking it’s getting harder to sort that out. We tend to think less of venues for publishing or being heard, but more of launch points to achieve what Ridolfo and DeVoss term as rhetorical velocity. Audience is a thing that develops, not a gathering of people to be engaged. The audience is bigger and farther away than ever. The mode of discourse in effect defines the audience, a view that jibes with the postmodern definition of community offered by Porter. And it’s these communities that we develop a collective imagination that expands how we perceive audience. As Covino and Joliffe mention, Walter Ong is one such person who saw the trends in communication and anticipated the dissolution of audience in an increasingly multimodal and interconnected society (14). But this was nothing new; audience had been less about people since people stopped being the primary tool for communication.