Friday, September 15, 2006

Audience

I've been thinking about audiences quite a bit lately as I skim the daily feature list from ORBLog and wonder whether I should alert them to my own blog. How much attention do I want? Most of the comments that have come my way so far have been from spammers ("Check my site to make money!), but I was pleased yesterday with a nice reply from Geekygirl Dawn Foster to my response to her post on Wikipedia.

So - audience. Right now I am audience as I read ORblogs and other items. I am also audience as I listen to UO's KWAX Classical radio right now playing Felix Mendelssohn's lovely Violin Concerto - boy do I love that piece.

Then, there's the question of audience addressed versus audience invoked, as explored by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford in their 1984 essay "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." CCC 35 (1984): 155-71. See references here Representing Audience which lists the 1984 essay in the Works Cited. In fact, looking at the listing from the Bedford Bibliography on Audience , there is much more about audience to consider.

Is a blogger a defacto - implicit if not explicit - public intellectual? Bloggers such as Glenn Reynolds seem to fit that idea. But an essay called "Women and Children Last" by Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright argues that the majority of blogs are journal style posted by young women, yet these are not valued in the same way as the political commentary provided by male pundits. In fact, looking back at my post from Tuesday I see that Will Richardson's definitions of "real" and "complex" blogging would rank pundits over teens.

Might the question by one of audience? If teen friends read teen blogs, are they valued less by society? If powerful (male?) politicians read "Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds , does that powerful audience make Reynolds's blog more valued?

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