Re-thinking Audience

I understand why people like my husband opt out of social media.  When he imagines Facebook, he sees posts recounting the Panama Canal Zone’s glory days.  He balks at nostalgia, but in fact, I think he’s worried that if he lets his nostalgia-flag fly, he’ll be overwhelmed with affection for his tropical childhood.  He’s also simply cynical about my social media motives, so I use him as a litmus test for potential postings. If he rolls his eyes and says “Oh my God,” three things happen in quick succession: 1) I know I’ve crossed the line from tolerable to unbridled bragging, 2) I decide his tolerance threshold is too low, and 3) I post anyway.

As you can tell, I’m at the other end of the social media spectrum.  Probably because I’m naturally nosey, I like seeing what people are doing or thinking.  And when my “likes” show names of Colorado friends next to Minnesota friends, grad school next to high school classmates, past colleagues adjacent to present, I delight in the collapse of space and time and revel in a sense of community…at least for a while.

I don’t totally ignore those eye rolls.  Eventually I’m reminded that my lovely, diverse “community” is also an “audience.” Posting, blogging, and engaging in social media is publishing, as well as performance.  In these digital times community and audience are synonymous.

In an article published in New Media & Society, researchers danah boyd and Alice Marwick say, “the idea of the ‘audience’ as a stable entity that congregates around a media object has been displaced with the ‘interpretive community’, ‘fandom’, and ‘participatory culture.” Yes, and in the 16th century, Shakespeare’s audiences, his Globe Theater “community,” were also quite participatory when they offered him feedback in the form of thrown tomatoes.

Beyond applause or rotten tomatoes, today’s “networked public” (boyd & Marwick) has the added, and somewhat terrifying, ability to record, archive, share, search, and find your published information at any future point. The ability of digital audiences to exceed time and space might be daunting, even paralyzing, to some who might otherwise participate in social media communities.

An awareness of the fluid context of audience is what Mary McCall refers to as being a “high monitor” (you can Google her presentation “What Would Aristotle Tweet?: Twitter, The Imagined Audience, and Message Reception” if you’re interested). She argues that we need to update how we are teaching our students about audience. She wants them to be “more reflective of potential audiences” and how their published ideas might be received.  She’s absolutely right.

If we haven’t already, it’s time to let go of the static questions aimed at a finite audience (see this handout from Read, Write, Think as an example).  We know most students are well-versed in publishing daily bursts from their lives and, though they may be loathe to admit it, performing for their friend community via carefully selected, often-edited images, ideas, and shares.  Teaching them to be high monitors and consider the vastness of their audience has obvious benefits, not least of which is making them good digital citizens.

But what effect might all this monitoring have on students, and frankly all of us, as writers and thinkers?  As we spend more and more time online participating in a networked public, are we unwittingly skipping over the non-published, drafting phase of the writing and thinking process? Does the draft matter?

Despite all the advantages that digital life affords, I worry it supplants thoughtful, private, off-the-page-and-stage thinking and writing critical for students’ intellectual and emotional growth. Best practice in English education involves plenty of authentic audience opportunities for students to publish their work, but let’s also be mindful for ourselves and our students to preserve a space where ideas can be explored and rehearsed, especially given our modern-day devotion to social media.

In our pursuit to share, to publish, to see our “likes” or grades, our challenge is to recognize the value of non-public, creative exploration.  Let’s not throw out the (draft) baby with the bath water.