Possibilities for Audience Theory in Writing Studies During the Twenty-First Century
Audience ambiguity
Audience is a crucial concept for the teaching of writing and to communication writ-large. Audience awareness assists writers in developing persuasive capabilities. But audience, as a term, is everywhere. It hovers in the background of every theory in writing studies. The looming omnipresence of audience is related to the term’s variety of meanings that continually adapt to contemporary writing theories.[1] In our classroom pedagogy, we likely use some form of the motto “consider your audience.”
Yet it’s uncommon to find explicit audience theory since Ede and Lunsford (“Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked”) sealed the fate of audience theory by having the term audience focus on specificity and situation. Thus, while “considering your audience” is a useful slogan because it emphasizes power relations and provides writers with agency, audience itself contains as many meanings as there are specific contexts. Audience can mean any number of readers, listeners, and (broadly) receivers of discourse. More conceptually, audience can mean those who acted when prompted by a rhetor, the disciplinary values of an academic field, the concatenation of responses on social media, and networks of people, things, and values. To add even more nuance, audience can take on these meanings but from the perspective of writers, speakers, or discourse producers. Audience, then, can have a broad, seemingly endless, array of meanings.
The ambiguity surrounding audience has been an ongoing issue in writing studies at least since Lisa Ede re-inaugurated the concept in 1979 with “On Audience and Composition.” Synthesizing a response to the then-recent surge in rhetorical theory (e.g., Hairston; Corbett), cognitive psychology (e.g., Kroll), and discourse theory (e.g., Winterowd) as well as the expressivists lack of concern for audience concern in the 1970s (e.g. Elbow), Ede was concerned with situational awareness for specific audiences and asked students to “create their own contexts” that could overcome the “artificiality” of the writing classroom (294).[2] For Ede, audience was ambiguous enough that it needed to be defined by students for their own purposes (294-5). Five years later, Ede and Lunsford published their now-canonical article “Audience Address/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy” which, like Ede’s previous work, emphasized concrete specific audiences.[3] Their shared concern over specificity is borne out of audience ambiguity, this time with the concern over the complex and iterative relationship between the audience addressed and the invoked audience (both of which are constructions of the writer). Mary Jo Reiff, almost two decades after Ede’s original piece, called direct attention to this ambiguity. Writing in response to Ede and Lunsford, Reiff writes:
While theorists and researchers seem to agree upon the importance of audience to the communicative process, there is no agreed upon meaning of audience. “Audience” is an unstable referent, a floating signifier. The term can refer to a construct in the writer’s mind-the “imagined,” “intended,” or “invented” audience. Or it can refer to a textual presence-the audience “implied” by textual cues or “inscribed” in the text. Audiences can also refer to “real” people-the actual readers who exist either apart from and prior to the text (as “addressed” readers) or those who exist as part of the community in which the text is produced. (407)
More than two decades after Reiff’s article, Byron Hawk’s Resounding the Rhetorical outlines, by way of new material and phenomenological thought (e.g., Gries; Rickert), a concern with the ambiguous nature of future and eventual audiences.
In “Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked” [Ede and Lunsford] propose, almost as an afterthought, the concept of eventual audience. For them, it is a reader who might stumble onto the work in the near future that the author didn’t address or invoke. But it also suggests a reader who might pull the work off of a book- shelf in some distant future and context that the author can’t possibly write for directly or imagine. It is a form of consequentiality that could not have been intended nor prefigured. (225)
Since at least 1980 then, a sense of ambiguity emerges in audience theory and scholarship, primarily because the term is a floating signifier.
In this essay, I trace how audience theory has taken shape since the 1980s, implicitly adapting to the theoretical “turns” in writing studies research, including discourse communities, publics, and networked ecologies. After doing so, I address a productive query that audience theory has wrestled with for the past forty years: when do we consider audience(s) while writing? I then posit that temporal considerations of audience in the 21st century extends to models of circulation, including after writers publish. This post-publication conception of audience asks us to consider algorithms, robots, and machines as possible audiences. I conclude by advocating for audience flexibility, which helps to develop pedagogies that teach students not to consider audience at one distinct moment in time but as ongoing emergent recursive activity.
A Genealogy of Audience Theory
Audience theory, in writing studies specifically and in communication studies more generally, is typically responsive to large-scale cultural, social, political, technological, and military events because these circumstances reveal how discourses are received and co-constructed by listeners, readers, and watchers. I therefore briefly need to trace audience theory before 1980 to provide context for audience theory’s emergence in writing studies. W. Russell Neuman (2016, p. 20-51), argues that theories of media effects were heavily influenced by the propaganda of World War II (WWII) and hypodermic needle theories of communication.[4] Mass media and mass culture paradigms largely dominated audience theory post-WWII, resulting in what I call the homogenization of audience theory. The homogenization of audience theory helps those in writing studies better understand why audience theory experienced a renaissance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, beginning with Lisa Ede’s “On Audience and Composition” and its spiritual sequel “Rhetoric versus philosophy: The role of the universal audience in Chaim Perelman’s The New Rhetoric.”
The homogenization of audience theory is shorthand for the essentializing of audiences as well as their dismissal. Two key concepts from the 1960s and 1970s are illustrative here: Walter Ong’s “fictionalized” audience and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “universal” audience. For Ong, writers must fictionalize their audience due to the time-space gap between writing their text and the eventual reader.[5] For Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, “Argumentation addressed to a universal audience must convince the reader that the reasons adduced are of a compelling character, that they are self-evident, and possess an absolute and timeless validity, intendent of local or historical contingencies” (1969, p. 32). In both accounts, specific and contextualized audiences are deemphasized, allowing writers (Ong) or speakers (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytec) to emphasize their own goals, thereby privileging the role of the discourse producer.
The homogenization of audience theory in the 1960s and 1970s is partially responsible for revitalization of audience theory in the 1980s, particularly in Composition Studies (e.g., Brooke and Hendricks; Cooper; Ede and Lunsford, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked”; Roth; Redd-Boyd and Slater; Rafoth; Rubin and Rafoth). Social worlds fade into the background in Ong and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytec theories, as well as in expressivist pedagogies (e.g., Elbow). Writers or speakers appear to be agents not influenced by broader sociocultural forces and institutional powers. (Lunsford and Ede accounted for these power relations in their 1996 sequel to the canonical 1984 article.) For those teaching writing in higher education, this is deeply problematic for two reasons. First, it denies the role of the teacher as an audience, an issue which is inescapable. There are of course other audiences that students can write for/to/with but the teacher remains a centripetal force upon students’ conception of audience (see Brooke and Hendricks for a discussion of ways we might address this issue). Second, and more conceptually, audiences influence writers, speakers, and communicators. To deny the importance of audience thus obfuscates the role of audience during writing and communication processes.
Compositionists and rhetoricians since the 1980s have developed a repertoire of ways consider the audience as well as alternatives to audience theory.[6] Four main strategies have emerged to consider audience, which I detail in the following sections. First, the initial reaction to the homogenization of audience theory was to emphasize concrete and specific audiences in the early 1980s. Second, compositionists and rhetoricians turned to discourse community to highlight the way that writers are influenced by audiences and do not necessarily produce discourse as individual agents. Once discourse community receded in importance—but remained embedded in writing studies’ vernacular—public writing and theories of publics helped to show the influence of concatenated audiences. Alongside these theories of publics arose networked ecologies. It’s important to note that these terms did not replace prior terms. Rather, these terms gradually accumulate on one another, adding to the ambiguity surrounding the term audience.
Audience Specificity: A Rebuke Against Imagined, Fictional, and Universal Audiences
The late 1970s and early 1980s in writing studies saw a reaction against the homogenization of audience theory. As Ede and Lunsford argued in “Audience Address/Audience Invoked,” “One way to conceive of ‘audience,’ then, is as an overdetermined or unusually rich concept, one which may perhaps be best specified through the analysis of precise, concrete situations” (168). Writing specialists and pedagogues sought to theorize audience specificity framed in situational rhetoric, thereby adopting a Bitzer-influenced model that often discarded theories from Vatz as well as Consigny—important to remember here is that Barbara Bisecker’s (attempted) resolution of the Bitzer-Vatz debate did not come along until 1989. This trend continued throughout the decade by adding nuanced interactionist concepts to the address/invoke paradigm, including involving audiences (Johnson; Roth), categorizing audiences (Rubin and Rafoth), and when to attend to audiences (Rafoth). Investigations into audience interactivity has continued for the last thirty years (Blakslee; Breuch; Ede and Lunsford, “Among the Audience”; Jackson and Wallin; Johnson; Reiff). The overall goal of audience specificity during the 1980s was to consider actual audiences—whether they are teachers or not—in order to produce genuine rhetorical situations, of which classrooms were generally considered to be genuine rhetorical situations (Brooke and Hendricks).
Epistemologically, this type of audience theory frames writerly knowledge as dependent on concrete situations that must be addressed. Readerly expectations of documents and genres are real, embodied expectations. In 1986, Gordon Thomas wrote, “From Martin Steinmann’s New Rhetorics in 1967 to virtually the entire May 1984 issue of College Composition and Communication, writing teachers have become progressively more concerned with how writers shape their discourse to the demands of a particular audience” (580). With respect to this conception, while knowledge of an audience may occur abstractly, that knowledge is most effective for persuasive purposes if such knowledge is based on concrete particularities. This ideology of particularity reigned supreme in the first half of the 1980s but it continues to dwell in our pedagogies and theories of audience.
This approach works well for teaching audience awareness by having students learn concrete expectations of readers as well as to understand that ethical considerations, including manipulation and pandering, emerge from specifics.[7] What constitutes manipulation and pandering, both core ethical concepts for audience theory, change situationally because “A fully elaborated view of audience….must relate the matrix created by the intricate relationship of writer and audience to all elements in the rhetorical situation. Such an enriched conception of audience can help us better understand the complex act we call composing. (Ede and Lunsford, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked,” 160-70). In terms of persuasiveness, specificity enables writers to learn audience expectations while not manipulating readers or simply fulfilling their wants and desires. The complexity of persuasion rests upon the specifics of the situation(s) involved in composing. David Fleming offers a rich view of persuasion that helps to describe these ethical concerns related to persuasion:
Our usual image of persuasion is something on the order of selling a used car to a stranger. A different image is invoked by trying to influence a friend or loved one, attempting to change that person even as, paradoxically, one accepts them just as they are. Imagine trying to persuade your parents to leave their home of fifty years for a retirement community. This is clearly and even uncomfortably an attempt at influence—you are trying, without hiding the fact, to move your parents in the direction you wish them to go—but that motive is accompanied by the belief that doing so is in their best interest. In trying to persuade them, you appeal to those interests. At the same time, you recognize their complete right not to be moved by you, their unquestioned independence in this matter. Both sides of this equation—the attempt to move one’s audience, the respect for them as they are—feel, to me, not like manipulation or pandering but like love. (520)
What might be manipulation in one situation might be rhetorical in another. Thus, to be fully persuasive for audiences, writers learn audience expectations to understand the nuances of individual, concrete situations and latent, contextual details. Manipulation and pandering in one situation might be radically different in another situation.
There are two primary weaknesses of this approach, the first being pedagogical and the second being theoretical. Pedagogically, audience specificity means that writing classrooms are put in the somewhat awkward position of trying to replicate genuine rhetorical situations. While it’s true that classrooms can function as rhetorical situations, it means that instructors must often try to simulate a situation in addition to addressing the structure of the writing classroom itself.[8] In terms of theory, audience becomes disconnected possible audiences, different depending on situation. This perspective forces students and other writers to react situationally and not in a more strategic manner. From the writer’s perspective, situations can become disconnected, creating an incoherent sense of purpose over a course that involves more than a single text. Moreover, audiences need to be identifiable. The practical problem with this approach is that audiences cannot always be identified, known, or addressed. The questions that consequently arise from this audience approach are as follows: how can writing instructors and theorists consider specific audiences they are not familiar with? What if there is no identifiable situation to analyze?
Discourse Community: A General Way to Conceive of Specific, Concrete Audiences
In response to these questions, audience theory’s main direction[9] was a turn to the metaphorical[10] concept discourse community (Bartholomae; Bizzell, “What Happens When Writers Come to College”; Porter), which is partially derived from discourse analysis.[11] Discourse community describes a community’s (purported) values and ways of thinking-acting-being.[12] The origin of discourse community appears to be Patricia Bizzell’s “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing,” where the term is first used, although it is not defined.[13] If writers and audiences are within a discourse community, the values of the discourse community structures the available choices to and between writer(s) and audience. A discourse community, as an idealized concept, structures insiders’ ideas, epistemologies, and ontologies while systemically ignoring or denying other values. David Bartholomae, in “Inventing the University,” illustrates that the discourse community implicitly guides the persuasive decisions of those in that community.
…when I think of “knowledge” I think of it as situated in the discourse that constitutes “knowledge” in a particular discourse community, rather than as situated in mental “knowledge sites.” One can remember a discourse, just as one can remember an essay or the movement of a professor’s lecture; but this discourse, in effect, also has a memory of its own, its own rich network of structures and connections beyond the deliberate control of any individual imagination. (145)
According to Gallagher, discourse community, as a term, “illustrates the influence of particular communities and groups on the composing process of individual writers” (“Considering the Comments,” 36). Here, we might substitute audiences for “particular communities and groups.”
Discourse community is crucial to audience theory because the audience and writer are tied together (or not) through a (or many) discourse community. Writers, then, must navigate members of discourse communities when composing. If writers need to consider their audience, then writers need to consider the values and ways of being for those within a discourse community. The audience, in the mind of the writer, has certain expectations, which are shaped by a discourse community. The writer must understand and account for the shared practices of audiences.
The strengths of discourse become pronounced when contrasted with audience specificity.[14] What if writers, such as students, have no firm grasp of a specific situation or task? Such writers may lack specific audiences with no way to “consider their audience.” To develop audience awareness might then be to consider the values, styles, and writing patterns of communities of certain people. While this necessarily engages in strategic essentialism,[15] such audience consideration likely assists writers with identifying rhetorical maneuvers they need to make in their writing. Conceptually, discourse community provides this type of audience awareness.
The main problem with discourse communities is that they do not actually exist. Both discourse and community are blurry concepts. Joseph Harris has called discourse communities “little more than a metaphor” (15). James E. Porter’s Audience and Rhetoric, which is the high mark for theorizing discourse community, has been critiqued for treating discourse community as actually existing.[16] Mary Jo Reiff claims, “Despite Porter’s attempt to define discourse communities as dynamic and flexible, the readers and writers who are members of the community are portrayed as a fairly homogenous group” (109). It is not possible to find a discourse community in reality; as I noted earlier, this disconnection from concrete situations is the primary reason for the widespread adoption of discourse community in writing studies pedagogies. It would be difficult to point to a concrete discourse community because the boundaries of that community are constantly overlapping and interwoven with other discourse communities.
In Writing/Disciplinarity, Paul Prior provides direct criticism of discourse community, arguing the concept relies on structuralist and Neoplatonist conceptions of reality. The concept of discourse community creates transmission models of knowledge that subsume individual variation to inaccurate generalizations about communities or groups of people within related spheres of interest but who may have wildly different and competing worldviews. For Prior,
…an abstract, unified model of communities (the social) and equally abstract representations of knowledge structures (the cognitive) leaves little room for multiplicity and agency. From this structuralist perspective, the person appears as little more than a specialized container within which language can be encoded and decoded and schemata can be structured and restructured. By separating the person from what is communicated and learned, transmission models create a kind of teflon subject—an a priori, asocial self not really altered by communication or learning. (18-19)
Here, Prior pinpoints the conceptual weakness of discourse community: they do not account for individual variation in disciplinary fields and research agendas. A member of a discourse community is not an actual person or individual with lived experiences but an idealized figure a prior to any concrete situation. In relation to audience, the concept of discourse community may have even been taken up precisely because it did just this; discourse communities are useful for writing assignments in which the situation or individual people are not readily identified. But discourse communities do not accurately describe concrete rhetorical situations or specific audiences because they rely on reified and homogenous representations of knowledges, communities, peoples, beliefs, and ways of being.
With the publication of Prior’s book in 1998, along with criticism from the late 1980s (e.g., Harris) and early 2000s (e.g., Canagarajah 60-70), discourse community does recede a bit in writing studies and audience theory.[17] It’s important to note that despite these criticisms of discourse community, the term has managed to survive in various places in writing studies—it’s survival has been strong enough that Prior and Olinger have labeled the term a zombie concept (127), meaning it keeps rising again, refusing to die. Discourse community is also used quite frequently in Technical and Professional Communication contexts (e.g., Zappen) in order to help bridge domains and knowledge gaps. But nevertheless, discourse community’s valorization and idealization cease. Consequently, what kind of audience models and ways to “consider your audience” arose after and alongside discourse community?
Theories of Public and Counterpublic Audiences
In terms of audience theory, theories of the public, publics, and counterpublics arose after and alongside discourse community. Theories of the public and publics began to connect to audience theory in the middle to late 1990s, emerging from community engagement efforts (e.g., service-learning), an infusion of Habermasian public sphere theory,[18] and the rise of accessible networked communication (e.g., the World Wide Web). Critical theory, notably queer theorist Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics,[19] also has a significance influence on theories of publics within writing studies. Public scholarship in writing studies then burgeoned in the early 2000s and continues to have resonances for writing studies in many ways, including rich connections to protest and civic responsibility, service learning, and public pedagogies.
Rosa Eberly’s work crystalizes this public turn[20] in terms of audience.[21] “…Given teachers’ and students’ general ambivalence toward readers, audiences, and communities as heuristics,” Eberly writes that “…writing teachers might, at some common points and places in their students’ and their own writing processes, find public a more useful concept than audience or reader or community for producing and analyzing discourses in the shared space of classrooms and beyond (“From Writers, Audiences, and Communities to Publics,” 166). Eberly goes on to discuss the importance of moving beyond specific situations and discourse communities into less confined spaces, both physical and metaphorical. This turn breaks down power relations and stability of audiences as an object of consideration. Eberly observes, “…the recognition that ethos and power operate differently in different publics-and in different kinds of publics-is one of the central strengths of publics theories for writing classrooms. That recognition allows for and embraces the complexity that conceptions of audience, reader, and community most often cannot” (171). Eberly’s argument, elaborated upon in her subsequent Citizen Critics, attempts to move audience theory beyond communities and situations and into complicated concatenations—and sometimes competing—audiences.
Eberly’s work highlights two strengths of the public turn as related to audience. First, it complicates specificity and discourse community by enabling multiple, heterogenous, and composite[22] audiences. Both audience concepts of specificity and discourse community tend to need individuated epistemologies to be effective. The public turn, however, frames multiple epistemologies for texts and writers. For these reasons, “a public” is more difficult to wrangle and invoke than a specific audience or member of a discourse community. Using textual cues to invoke an audience may cause some parts of that public not to read—invoking an audience may disinvoke other parts of that same public. Writing for the public, publics, and even counterpublics has the distinct advantage of being able to write for an ensemble and a concatenation of possible readers, viewers, and listeners with multiple divisions, some of which are discernible whereas others are invisible or unannounced.
Second, in doing so, this perspective considers audiences inside and outside the writing classroom simultaneously. As Peter Mortensen notes in “Going Public,” going public means writing for “general readers” (188) beyond the classroom, while still allowing for audiences within the classroom. The community created during the course, such as other students and the instructor, can still be authentic and genuine audiences. Neither audience specificity or discourse offers this advantage. With approaches that advocate for audience specificity, audience is circumscribed by situation. There can be multiple situations, but they do not overlap. In terms of discourse community perspectives, discourse communities themselves are portrayed at homogenous, unitary entities. In fairness to this perspective, there are always multiple, competing discourse communities within individuals (Bizzell, Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, 80) but to write for a discourse community means to write for the idealized, unindividuated audience that is a discourse community. Publics offer the simultaneity of competing and complementary audiences. When writing for a “public,” students benefit from the considering both their peers, instructors, general readers, unfriendly readers, and so forth—all at the same time. Public and publics thus encompass a broad range of values, discourse, and ways of being to explain understand why some texts or messages are adopted or not.
But perspectives of publics-as-audiences brings weaknesses familiar to that of discourse community. The public, publics, and counterpublics are still reified when framed as possible audiences. On the other hand, if discourse communities are too homogenous and do not account for individuals, then publics are often too heterogenous, not necessarily accounting for institutions and power structures. Perhaps even more insidiously, like the ideology of democracy that undergirds public sphere theory, publics-as-audience are often too optimistic and portrayed (at least until recently) as responding to logical arguments.
Publics, like audience specificity and discourse community, continues to survive in the purview of writing studies. But this perspective has morphed since publics was introduced to writing studies in the mid-1990s. It has become more networked and ecological, which is the fourth element to which I now turn.
Audiences as Networked Ecologies
Drawing from public sphere theory, discourse communities, activity theory, genre theory, and audience specificity, contemporary perspectives that frame audience as networked ecologies attempt show the ways that concatenations of audiences interact (Roth; Johnson) with writers and one another. This perspective, in terms of its history, cuts across the previous forms of audience theory, beginning with Marilyn Cooper’s “The Ecology of Writing” in 1986 and continuing through the last four decades (e.g., Coe; Dobrin; Gottschalk; Syverson).[23] However, beginning in 2005 with Jenny Edbauer’s “Unframing Models of Distribution,” the public turn transmuted into an ecological turn (e.g., Rivers and Weber). I used transmuted here to imply that publics and networked ecologies both fall under the auspice of a broader investigation of circulation in writing studies.
Audience as networked ecologies opens interesting questions and “new vistas” while showing the limitations of prior models (Cooper 372). In both Edbauer’s and Cooper’s conceptions, audience cannot be circumscribed as a community nor in its specific situation. For Edbauer, the situation is “…better conceptualized as a mixture of processes and encounters” (13) that merge and meld into one another. It is evident that Edbauer sees public perspectives as crucial to networked ecologies. In a discussion of the way the phrase “Keep Austin Weird” spreads beyond its original intended situations, Edbauer writes, “This public scene forces us into a rather fluid framework of exchanges—a fluidity that bleeds the elements of rhetorical situation. Indeed, the (neo)Bitzerian models cannot account for the amalgamations and transformations—the viral spread—of this rhetoric within its wider ecology” (19). Intentionality here is crucial; messages and other forms of discourse spread beyond their original boundaries, seeping into (and out of) unintended contexts and “publics.” Arguing along the same lines in 1986, Cooper concludes that ecological models—with real, embodied readers—provide writing instructors with innovative new questions.
Questions we might seek answers to include: What kind of interactions do writers and readers engage in? What is the nature of the various roles readers play in the activity of writing? What institutional arrangements encourage writer-reader interaction? How do writers find readers to work with? How do writers and readers develop ideas together? How do writers and readers alter textual forms together? (372)
Cooper goes on to write, in a passage that reads like it could be placed alongside Edbauer’s 2005 argument, “…the ideal image the ecological model projects is of an infinitely extended group of people who interact through writing, who are connected by the various systems that constitute the activity of writing” (372). Here, Cooper argues for audiences to be conceived as a chain of readers extending outwards. I’d add here that this network could be organized or chaotic depending the activity to which the audiences are responding. Cooper and Edbauer both demonstrate that networked ecologies are significantly more rhizomatic than any public model. Consequently, “considering your audience” become less a certain aphorism and more of an attempt to circulate effects on possible readers that may or may not reached.
In my view, perspectives that frame audience as networked ecologies have at least two demonstrable advantages and one crucial weakness. First, audiences as networked ecologies allow writers to consider unexpected, competing, and irrational reception of texts. Irrational and vitriolic responses, though anticipated by public theories, is unexpected by previous perspectives due to a ratiocritical idealization of democracy. Moreover, inattention of texts and total lack of reception have no real formulated analysis in audience specificity, discourse community, or public/publics/counterpublics. There is no real sense of “drumming up” attention in any of these audience perspectives save for network ecologies. Second, networked ecologies can contain specific situations, discourse communities (from a metaphorical perspective), and publics. In this sense, the previous audience perspectives are contained within networked ecologies.
In terms of the weakness of this perspective, audiences do not encounter the texts of writers randomly or what we call “virally.” There is some structure and causality in writer-audience relationships when it comes to writing. Thus, while Edbauer argues, “A given rhetoric is not contained by the elements that comprise its rhetorical situation (exigence, rhetor, audience, constraints). Rather, a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field” (14), it’s also important to remember that audiences (and other elements) do not emerge ex nihilo, circulating like a virus. In Edbauer’s well-cited argument, the phrase, “Keep Austin Weird,” does not circulate randomly; there are people and corporations actively moving the message with specific intentions.[24] The aleatory effects of networked ecologies, in this sense, should not be conflated causes that may be readily identified. For instance, algorithms are one way that audiences encounter writing on online, as others in writing studies have noted (e.g., Brock and Shepherd; Gallagher; Laquintano and Vee).
With this weakness in mind, networked ecologies do not provide ample demarcations of various interactions between writers and audiences. Interactions are ontological equally but in reality, some interactions are important than others. Some audiences have more power than other audiences and can change the reception of a text. (Think here of an unknown Twitter user between retweeted or attacked by a celebrity, thus changing the circulation of the original tweet.)
When to Consider: Audience Theory in an Era of Circulation
In practical terms, I’ve laid out this somewhat lengthy genealogy of audience to help instructors conceptualize how they could teach multiple approaches to audience awareness. In more theoretical terms, this genealogy has been meant to show the stark similarities and differences between ways that writing researchers have sought to understand audience. Both practically and theoretically, one of the main concerns that cuts across these perspectives is that of temporality. Every perspective that involves considering audiences must consider when to consider these audiences during the act of composing.
Each perspective tackles temporality in different ways. Audience specificity asks writers to consider audience as something to anticipate, predict, and create to varying degrees. As Ede and Lunsford write, “…the term audience refers not just to the intended, actual, or eventual readers of a discourse, but to all those whose image, ideas, or actions influence a writer during the process of composition” (168). The specificity perspective occurs before or at least during the situation. Discourse community serves to help the writer anticipate and predict earlier in the composing process by (problematically) providing values and conventions which writers assign to the community. Discourse communities are metaphors that writers use understand the beliefs of certain groups in order to deploy a language effectively. (Another reason why discourse communities need to be recognized as mental heuristics and not actual communities.) Publics and networked ecologies get at this question a bit more chaotically. If we return to Edbauer’s argument, the “force of messages” “accrete over time” in order to “determine the shape of public rhetoric” (20). Considering audiences as publics and networked ecologies occurs at multiple, if somewhat random, points during the composing process as the public or network continued to take and alter shape.
This brings me to a recent perspective on audience, namely that of considering audiences after publication (Gallagher, Update Culture). In an era of circulation and networked technologies, in which messages can take on a life of their own,[25] repurposed with “rhetorical velocity” (Ridolfo and DeVoss), writers need to consider their audience not only before and during the act of composing but also after the act of composing. Moreover, writers need to consider future and eventual audiences, especially in light of social media platforms. But considering audiences after publication is not entirely a random set of encounters. Rather, individual and organizations often direct or redirect when writing circulates to publics or networked ecologies. Corporations, for instance, often circulate negative news on Fridays at 6 pm EST, often called a “news dump.” This news dump prevents the news from being covered too rapidly. On social media platforms, messages are amplified after publication by celebrities or influencers. Timing writing to reach audiences can be kairotic due to human endeavors.
But humans are not the only audiences in contemporary circulation. Writers might for instance consider algorithms as audiences (Gallagher, “Writing for Algorithmic Audiences”). In an era of circulation and post-publication audience consideration, there are other non-human audiences that may be receivers and readers of writing. If we are to consider audience post-publication, then we should consider algorithms, robots, and machines as possible audiences.
Machine Audiences
In the 21st century, algorithms, robots, and machines can be audiences for writers and for student writers. To be clear, I do not mean machines that score student essays can be audiences, a topic that is has been taken up in-depth by writing researchers. Rather, I am arguing that as advances in computer science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence grow, we need to consider algorithms, robots, and machines as genuine interlocutors for writing and communication. We need to teach students to consider these machinations as audiences.
Before I continue, I recognize the argument for algorithms, robots, and machines as audiences has an uphill battle in writing studies. After all, the etymology of audience means “to perceive,”[26] which is bound to make those of us who teach writing bristle at the idea that machines can perceive. Two perspectives are emblematic of this skepticism. First, in his 2005 chair’s address, “Who Owns Writing?” Douglas Hesse summarily dismisses machines as genuine audiences or interlocutors instead viewing them as games.
In the machine dream, writing would become a sort of dull game, an interaction with software to produce a score. Its consequences would be all regulative, something done to get through a gate. That’s the worst-case scenario. Ultimately, in terms of students’ perceptions, I can predict two others. In a best-case scenario, students would perceive writing for computer programs as a kind of interesting dummy-exercise, preparation for “real writing.” They would seamlessly translate making for machines into performing for people. In a middle-case scenario, students would experience writing as a forked activity. Down one road would lie writing as a dull activity whose sole function is to generate a score. That’s the way of school. Down another road lies writing to accomplish something in a world of writers and readers. School would have almost nothing to say to this world. (341-342)
The three visions Hesse presents are relatively believable but there is not room in Hesse’s vision for valuing actual machines. Instead, we are given a scale of negativity in terms of writing for and to machines. Considering machines as audiences would be (1) dull boring game, (2) an exercise that is not legitimate writing, or (3) some combination of the initial two perspective. Hesse’s perspective represents an engrained perspective in writing studies towards machine readers: such audiences are not real but instead either a game or a simulation in service to other human beings.
The second perspective picks up on the embodied and emotional aspects of writing. In “What Happens When Machines Read Our Students’ Writing,” Anne Herrington and Charles Moran write:
Writing to a machine—particularly over multiple occasions, particularly for instructional purposes—desensitizes us as writers. As we wrote to the machine, we felt less investment in figuring out something we wanted to say than we do when we are writing to human readers. We thought less of rhetorical, affective, and interpretive interests that human readers might have. (497)
Herrington and Moran’s perspective treats machines a bit more as audiences in that they describe the affect of writing to machines rather than solely focusing on the machine-scoring of student essays. Writing for machines, in their view, was almost dehumanizing for them. It was a cold detached process, especially as they wrote multiple times.
Undergirding both Hesse’s and Herrington and Moran’s arguments is an assumption that humans are doing what machines are not. Hesse’s case assumes that human-to-human writing will likely not be a game—but as anyone who has written a grant proposal will understand, there are many instances in which writing for humans turns into a game. Similarly, we write all the time for humans as exercises preparing our writing for the “real world”—think here of sharing your writing with an audience who is supposed to be an effective simulation for another audience. In Herrington and Moran’s experiences, they assume that writing for human beings is a deeply connecting experience. But as academic writers who have dealt with unfeeling and remorseless reviewers understand, writing for human beings can indeed be a dehumanizing experience. My criticism here is not to argue that these scholars are wrong about machines; rather, their notions of writing, audience, context, and purpose are overtly positive when it comes to human readers.
Writers and writing instructors should of course remain skeptical with machines as audiences. Machines are often black boxes. But so too are human beings. As instructors, it’s often difficult to explain our own latent expectations of student writing or how we came to have those expectations even after years of experience, a phenomenon that Pierre Bourdieu called “genesis amnesia” (79). If we recognize that Hesse’s and Herrington and Moran’s criticism can apply to human beings as well as machines, then potential skepticism with machine audiences lessens, opening partial methodological and pedagogical avenues between machines and humans.
Two contexts in which machines audiences already exist help to illustrate such avenues and applications for our pedagogies. The first is technical and the latter emotional. First, consider that many companies now use applicant tracking systems (ATS) that deploy computational models, e.g., algorithms, to read applications and even interview applicants using facial recognition technology. Although it’s clear that these algorithms are racist, classist, and misogynistic (e.g., Eubanks; Noble; O’Neil; Pasquale), these algorithms will inevitably grow in usage as the 21st century progresses. Teaching students how to write resumes and other related genres and documents to be machine read will be crucial as more hiring processes are automated. But this pedagogy is not dissimilar to teaching the use of search engines and databases. Most of us who teaching research processes and genres often take database and search engine manipulation as crucial to the teaching of writing. Using the results of search engines and designing resumes to be scanned by algorithms are forms of machine audiences. In pedagogical terms, we need to see these cold, mundane robots and algorithms as genuine audiences for students and their writing and writing processes.
The second example may stretch some beliefs here, as it relates to emotional connections. Machines can respond to our writing, causing both positive and negative emotional responses, much like human audiences. People use voice-assistants in everyday life (Siri,, Google home, Alex, etc.), often with frustration. Social media bots can make snide and vitriolic comments (Alvarez). But other times, users can turn to writing to chatbots for comfort, such as the Woebot (https://woebot.io/). As Clive Thompson reports for The New York Times,
Woebot does not pretend to be human; it appears as a cartoon robot when it chats with you on Facebook Messenger, and it acknowledges its own artifice (as when it declares, for example, “I’m going to tell you a little bit about how I like to work with humans”). But its personality is otherwise upbeat, its conversations peppered with emoji and animated gifs (like the cheering Minions from “Despicable Me”) to congratulate you for doing psychological work. In a study with 70 young adults, Darcy found that after two weeks of interacting with the bot, the test subjects had lower incidences of depression and anxiety. They were impressed, and even touched, by the software’s attentiveness.
Woebot is one example of people using machines and other types of “artificial intelligence” to write for positive emotional and affective purposes. It is true that many machine audiences may not be as kind as Woebot but that does not mean we should dismiss these technologies, programs, algorithms, and models. In fact, if we encounter combative bot-like audiences that respond with disinformation (deliberately wrong information) or misinformation (wrong information produced by error), then our exigencies for considering machines is made that much more urgent.
I thus urge us to consider machines as audiences for three reasons. First, doing so avoids seeing a schism between human and nonhuman audiences. Second, machine audiences are already in existence and will emerge in new communicative contexts. Third, there are emotional and affective machine audiences and robot readers that can have positive effects on writers. But regardless of whether machines are positive for writers is somewhat irrelevant; there are helpful and hurtful human audiences too. Instead, consider machines, robots, and algorithms as audiences pushes the boundaries of audience theory and pedagogy into new directions for the 21st century.
Conclusion: Audience Flexibility
While machine audiences will be beneficial for audience theory as the 21st century progresses, my more modest goal for this essay is to advocate for what I call audience flexibility. Using multiple analogies, metaphors, and perspectives about who or what can be audiences will yield, I believe, more nuanced and detailed level of audience awareness for our students. Taking a flexible stance towards audiences is in line with what Spiro, Feltovich, Coulson, and Anderson advocate in their report, “Multiple Analogies for Complex Concepts: Antidotes for Analogy-Induced Misconception in Advanced Knowledge Acquisition,” namely that using single analogies does not yield advanced knowledge:
…although single analogies rarely if ever form the basis for a full understanding of a newly encountered concept, there is nevertheless a powerful tendency for learners to continue to limit their understanding to just those aspects of the new concept covered by mapping it to the old one. Analogies seduce learners into reducing complex concepts to a simpler and more familiar analogical core. (1)
My goal in presenting the various competing and complementary perspectives on audience has been to void using single metaphors or individual analogies for developing deeply contextualized audience awareness. Rather than reduce audience consideration to a one analogy or conception, placing audience specificity, discourse community, public/publics, network ecology, and machines adjacent to one another can develop complex awareness of persuasive and communicative activity. Instead of asking students to “consider your audience,” we might ask them to consider audiences in multiple ways, at multiple moments of composing, and in possibly competing ways.
For these reasons, the various strategies I have presented in this article’s genealogy, along with the concomitant strengths and weaknesses of each perspective, could be taught to students for the purposes of developing audience awareness. By doing so, I believe we can assist students with developing audience flexibility. As Aristotle famously claimed about persuasion, “Let rhetoric be defined as an ability in each particular case to see the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle, 37). Those who engage in persuasion need to understand the available means of persuasion. Persuasion—not pandering or manipulation—is predicated upon understanding a multiplicity of audiences in order to truly change a person’s mind or a group of people’s mind. I want to expand our understanding of audience to multiple entities, including algorithms, robots, and machines. If we as writing instructors place machine audience on similar footing to human audiences, then we have begun to provide students with a broader sense of audience flexibility. In the 21st century, this flexibility is crucial as new persuasive discourses emerge.
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[1] See Park (“The Meanings of ‘Audience’” and “Analyzing Audience”) and Selzer for the variety of terms the field has used to describe audience.
[2] This concern for teachers being an artificial audience would continue throughout the 1980s, culminating in the poignant Audience Expectations and Teacher Demands (Brooke and Hendricks). This trend also continues in more recent times. Nedra Reynolds has argued in Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference that teachers being an artificial audience creates a binary between “real world” writing and classroom writing: “To claim that writing classes are mere rehearsal for the ‘real world out there’ reproduces a binary relationship between the world and the academy that geographers and many postmodern spatial theorists would reject. Attending to the social production of space, to the interplay of conceived, perceived, and lived space, makes claims of the real world hugely problematic since teaching and learning can only occur within the swirl of the trialectics of space, where the sociospatial world becomes imprinted upon readers and writers, and as they leave their mark, too, on the sociospatial world” (44).
[3] “But even this single case demonstrates that the term audience refers not just to the intended, actual, or eventual readers of a discourse, but to all those whose image, ideas, or actions influence a writer during the process of composition. One way to conceive of ‘audience,’ then, is as an overdetermined or unusually rich concept, one which may perhaps be best specified through the analysis of precise, concrete situations” (Ede and Lunsford 168).
[4] Hypodermic needle theories are often reported as having argued that messages are taken up by audiences; the metaphor here is that messages are injected into audiences. However, such theories that evolved in the late 1940s and 1950s were in fact more nuanced than this typical depiction (Neuman 26). The studies often tried to understand the diversity of how audiences received messages and reacted to them.
[5] For more on eventual audiences, I recommend Edwin Black’s Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (1978), in particular the discussion of the Coatesville address (p. 78-90; focus on p. 88).
[6] One alternative to audience theory is genre theory, which burgeoned around the same time as audience specificity. While this essay does not address genre theory in-depth, it’s important to note that beginning with Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action,” genre theory has subsumed audience to be a genre feature. That is, “If we understand genres as typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations,” (Miller 159) then audience is simply one part of recurrent situations (in part due to Miller’s reliance on a Bitzer-infused conception of situation). Audience becomes another element to consider rather than the driving force behind other elements. Audience theory, rather than genre theory, foregrounds readers, listeners, and other audiences as the reasons why context, genre forms, and other elements take shape.
[7] This concern has been considered for the past forty years, ranging from Ede and Lunsford’s canonical “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy” to David Fleming’s “Fear of Persuasion in the English Language Arts”
[8] In “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” Walker Gibson proposed the idea of mock readers in 1950, which I see a precursor to the idea of a simulated reader.
[9] See footnote 4.
[10] It’s crucial here that discourse communities do not actually exist at all and rely on neoplatonic thought (i.e., relating to the Platonic forms) that foregrounds pre-structured notions of reality that do not correspond to empirical evidence.
[11] “Discourse analysis aims to enable you to make that argument, to do intellectual work of significance to the community, and hence, to persuade readers that you are a worthy coworker” (Bizzell, “College Composition: Initiation into the Academic Discourse Community, 81)
[12] See Gee, 143-5
[13] As Paul Prior notes in an unpublished conference presentation: “In the early 1980s, the notion of discourse communities was clearly an idea in the air. Between 1981 and 1983, David Bartholomae, Charles Bazerman, Patricia Bizzell, Shirley Brice Heath, and Martin Nystrand separately published texts that related interest in the social contexts of writing/literacy to some notion of community. The intellectual origins for this work were diverse: Dell Hymes’ speech communities, Stanley Fish’s interpretive communities, Stephen Toulmin’s field-specific arguments, Michel Foucault’s discourses, and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm-following knowledge communities” (3).
[14] In my view, discourse community came to prominence because it was historically useful to contrast with audience specificity.
[15] For instance, if we are writing to a group of voters (Democrats or Republicans in the USA), we might think about the values of that group in order to develop lines of communication. While no group of voters is homogenous, we need to make strategic essentialist claims if we decide to write to that group.
[16] In a review of Audience and Rhetoric, audience theorist Jack Selzer wrote, “I'm also still uneasy with Porter’s conflation of audience with discourse community. Porter’s subsuming of the term ‘audience’ under the broader term ‘discourse community’ requires us to discard the term ‘audience’ as having insufficient explanatory power, but both terms still seem to me to be worth retaining” (“Review” 128).
[17] I’ve sketched out rough historical markers for audience specificity (the 1980s) and discourse community (mid-1980s through the mid-1990s). These dates are loose because discourse community arose around the same time as audience specificity but it came to prominence a little while later in the 1980s. I’ve attempted to keep the dates somewhat imprecise because I do not believe they line up neatly or clearly. Rather these two branches of audience theory run often in parallel—sometimes competing while at other times being complementary.
[18] See Michael Bernard-Donals “Against Publics (Exilic Writing)”
[19] It’s a bit odd that writing studies, as a field, appears to ignore role of queer theory in Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics
[20] See Frank Farmer’s After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur (esp. 1-19 as well as chapters three and four)
[21] Recently, Eberly’s Towers of Rhetoric: Memory and Reinvention (2018) has continued this work around publics, focusing on how those in higher education remember significant (and heartbreaking) events. Specifically, Eberly examines public memories (and her own) of the 1996 tower shootings at the University of Texas at Austin and the child sexual abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University.
[22] Composite audience (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 21) is a useful way to describe concatenations of various audiences; however, it’s important to note that actual empirical evidence—and not “audience conjectures”—is needed when understanding how composite audiences react to acts of discourse (Stromer-Galley and Schiappa)
[23] This is a limited list and I ask authors for some forgiveness if I have left out their work.
[24] John R. Gallagher’s Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing has made a similar point with Laurie Gries circulatory analysis of Shepherd Fairey’s Obama Hope photograph in Still Life With Rhetoric.
[25] “Circulation refers to the potential for that message to have a document life of its own and be re-distributed without your direct intervention” (Porter 213).
[26] The Latin term audentia literally means to “hear” or “listen” but more conceptually it means to perceive.