An Overview of Audience: Working to Complicate Trait-Views of Audience

Jack Selzer's article focuses on the notion of discourse communities as a ways to disrupt more traditional notions of "audience" often associated with what Julie called on our discussion board, the "pipeline" approach (this is what we often see in market and statistical research). Selzer accomplishes this by locating the composer within the discourse community. In other words, while traditional theories of audience have often situated the audience and the rhetor in separate spaces, Selzer blurs this relationship and therefore encourages us to acknowledge this more dynamic sense of composing and viewing/reading texts.

While Selzer's work blurs the boundaries between audience and composer by locating the composer in the discourse community of the audience, Porters work accomplishes this by focusing on the relationships between production and consumption in a temporal sense. That is, by privileging the spaces in between production and consumption, Porter is able to, like Selzer, focus on consumption and production as two sides of the same coin.

Bennett also extends the critique of statistical senses of audience by critiquing opinion polling. Bennett proposes three active audience views of readers.

Ang's piece moves in a similar direction as the Selzer, Bennett and Porter in that Ang writes against the assumption that market research methodologies aren't adequate to gauge a sense of audience as complex. Ang offers contextualizing methodologies such as ethnography as a way to work against the flattened senses of audience that exist when audience merely becomes a list of traits. Yet, Ang is aware that ethnography, too, is bound to miss complexity as it offers us so much contextual data to grapple with. A contextual sense of audience, for me, doesn't blur the boundaries to the same extent as the work by Selzer and Porter.

Sundet and Ytreberg, for me, made the most compelling argument in that they suggest that despite the convergence of producers and consumers in our contemporary society, participation or the blurring of these lines don't necessarily guarantee the kinds of positive associations that we link with activity. Additionally in Sundet and Ytreberg, I thought that technologies themselves were used as a means of complicating senses of audience. In the rest of the texts, I felt like the end goal was to focus on audiences as active rather than passive and that this seemed like a positive end in and of itself; yet, Sundet and Ytreberg complicated not only how we conceive of audiences but also were successful in complicating the social and cultural implications of new ways for thinking about audience.