Theorizing Audience Awareness in Web-Based Self Presentation
Erin Karper
Niagara University
Won't Someone Think of the Children?
Common beliefs:
- "When they're online, people don't think about audience."
- "People who post stuff online assume that people from real life can't find it."
- "If people would just be aware of who could be seeing what they put online, there wouldn't be so much trouble."
With a capital T which rhymes with P which stands for Pool! Wait, wrong corrupter of our youth.
Putting the Confessional in Professional
These video clips are from an online Web portfolio that a student did in one of my Writing for the Web classes.
Clicking on the video links will open a new window with the video files.
Video Clip One (MPG Format)
Video Clip Two (MPG Format)
Yes, these are actual clips from a student portfolio I received after we had a discussion about audience appropriate material and professionalization.
Just Say No To Moms On MySpace
A teenager produces a radio story to protest that her mother read her friends-only LiveJournal posts; her mother, who also has a MySpace page, provides a rebuttal.
Listen (Real Media Format) || Read a Transcript
I actually heard this story while I was in the car with my own mother. The discussion which ensued was...interesting.
Think Before You Drink, I Mean Post
A public service announcement from the US government, the Ad Council, and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Watch (Opens in a new window)
When I was growing up, it was just "this is your brain on drugs." We still have those, but apparently MySpace is what's really killing our children (one assumes they die from embarrassment).
So?
- Are people always ignoring audience or being unaware of audience when they write online?
- What about those "digital natives," anyways? Surely they possess audience awareness?
- Maybe it's more complicated.
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If it weren't more complicated, this presentation would be a lot shorter.
It's always more complicated.
What about...
- how people build assumptions about audience based on faulty data about how the Web works?
- how trust filtering tools allow people to address, invoke, and involve a specific audience?
- how a quest for technological mastery or a need to demonstrate digital literacy might override all other rhetorical considerations, including audience?
- how the "involved audience" shapes web-based self presentation?
Or we could always go with the prevailing popular hypothesis of "people don't know any better" and go have coffee.
You Can't Hide Your Blog Under Your Bed
- 52% of bloggers “say they blog mostly for themselves, not for an audience” (Pew Internet and American Life Project’s 2006 report on “Bloggers.”)
- What causes people to believe that a blog is a mostly-private endeavor which is not meant for an audience when it is (often) inherently a public act?
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The picture is from a sarcastic take on the "pretty pretty princess" thing
Misperceptions of How the Web Works
Misperceptions held by people who produce material for the Web include beliefs that:
- the material they put on the Web will not be indexed by search engines and render their content untraceable.
- pseudonymity or anonymity will shield them from an unwanted audience.
- the vastness of the Web will provide security through obscurity.
Writers seem to be invoking an audience that is incongruous with the one actually being addressed.
Google Sees All
| While some are aware that they are “writing for Google,” many others are unaware that “Google and its ilk enable a readership vastly larger than what the author envisioned” (Lenhart, 2005, p. 81). |
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There was a lot of media coverage (and blogging) about this; I picked BoingBoing because it's very popular.
Half and Half (More or Less)
- 55% of bloggers surveyed use a pseudonym to “avoid the problem of colliding life spheres and to protect personal privacy”
- 43% use their real names
(Pew Internet and American Life Project, “Bloggers,” 2006).
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Pseudonymous blogging seems especially popular among academics.
Misplaced Confidence(s)
| "Many bloggers feel relatively confident in their online anonymity, reasoning that connecting their offline selves to their online selves would be a more difficult process than the average person would undertake, and that the large number of other weblogs and personal websites makes it unlikely that theirs will be found by people they hope do not see it" (Lenhart, 2005, p. 82). |
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Heather Armstrong's experience is from whence the verb "to be Dooced" (fired for blogging) comes.
Trust Filtering
Another way that people perceive and manipulate audience in Web-based self-presentation is through “trust filtering,” “friends-locking,” or “friends-only” posting.
Trust filtering means restricting the visibility of and access to material posted on a blog, journal, or social networking site. |
The LiveJournal update page. |
Through the use of trust filtering, the audience may be defined and controlled by password-protecting certain posts or by using tools provided by blogging, journaling and social networking sites which allow people to control access to material by restricting it to other users who are logged into the site.
Audience Addressed/Invoked/Involved
- Through trust filtering, “the audience called up or imagined by the writer” can be exactly equivalent to “those actual or real-life people who read a discourse” (Lunsford and Ede, 1984, p. 156).
- Trust filtering causes people to believe that they can control exactly who has access to specific material by merging the addressed audience with the invoked one.
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Facebook Limited Profile settings page |
With trust filtering tools, “knowledge of this audience’s attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible […] but essential” (Lunsford and Ede, 1984, p. 156). In many ways, trust filtering truly demonstrates the “synthesis of perspectives” described by Lunsford and Ede (p. 167).
The Best Laid Schemes
Trust filtering and its inherent assumptions can have the following effects:
- allowing writers to tailor material for the specific audience that they believe that they are addressing and invoke a specific role for the reader through the textual or technological cues which explain that the information is filtered.
- causing the candid self-disclosure that has become a hallmark of most people’s perception of Web-based self-presentations because the writer believes that the information is not for public consumption.
According to a 2006 study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 66% of teens who have created profiles on social networking sites limit access to their profiles.
Gang Aft Agley
Trust filtering can fail, causing the writer to be addressing a larger audience than they are invoking.
- A user may forget to set permissions correctly and thus make something public.
- The site may malfunction and reset the permissions on content.
- The site management may allow a larger number of users to access the site than before.
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Facebook's main page when logged in |
For example, companies and other types of employers have been gaining greater access to Facebook, an extraordinarily popular social networking site aimed primarily at high school and college students, which meant that material that users had assumed was restricted only to an audience of their peers (and the occasional professor) was now available to a completely different – and often disapproving – audience. The “general public” is also gaining access to Facebook as well.
Save Ferris, Er, Facebook
In late 2006, Facebook created "news feeds" of information about other users.
- Users wanted their audience to have to pull information about their "friends" rather than having it be pushed to them when they entered the site.
- Users staged an online revolution and ultimately regained some of the "privacy controls" that they perceived as having lost.
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The Save Facebook petition page. |
In the news feed, upon logging in, users were given a new feed of information about their “friends” as defined on the site, such as when people had been added to or removed from a person’s grouping of friends, or when someone’s “status” as a boyfriend or girlfriend had changed. While in this case Facebook had not compromised the information provided by users, users felt as if their information was being “overshared” with the audience . This lead to online petitions, and the creation of an entire site called “Save Facebook."
When the Technical Overrides the Rhetorical
Another view of how users perceive audience on the web could be when the need to achieve control over the technologies of Web composition and/or a desire to “play” with the technologies of Web composition overrides other rhetorical considerations, including audience, in the thoughts and actions of the composer.
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An example of a Web page done by a beginning designer who was "just playing." |
Be glad that I'm sparing you many of the "my first Web pages" in my collection.
Just Push Play
Engagement with the technical process of composition sometimes overwhelms rhetorical awareness, especially when beginners are frustrated with “making it work” or “just playing” with Web design.
Beginning composers often choose to leave rhetorically inappropriate choices on pages either to demonstrate their technical mastery or because they do not want to spend time un-doing their work.
In either case, they will publish the work on the Web but dismiss it as “just play” when asked about the rhetorical implications.
While my research was confined to composers creating static pages for self-presentation, I think that the “audience override” and/or “just play” perspectives can be extrapolated to explain some of the audience-inappropriate choices of people using dynamic systems for Web-based self-presentation such as blogging or online journaling software and social networking sites.
Something Unpredictable
The limits of Web composers’ technical knowledge and skills, or limited resources at hand, may also lead them to make audience-inappropriate choices simply because they see no other viable options for completing a project.
For example: The student videographer's desire to show technical mastery (“I can create video clips with music”) overrode the rhetorical consideration of audience (“Is showing pictures of people doing a keg stand set to a Green Day song going to make a favorable impression on my audience?”).
A similar incident happened in one of my first-year composition classes, where a student who was eager to use pictures on a home page but who was mindful of discussions of fair use and copyright decided to include pictures of himself posing with a giant inflatable phallus right under the paragraph where he discussed how much he wanted to be a physical education teacher and work with young children.
While there were certainly other factors that influenced these students’ choices, I would argue that their desire to use and show mastery of the technologies for Web composition combined with limited resource availability were significant factors in their decision to not critically consider audience and to make audience-inappropriate choices.
From Audience Invoked to Audience Involved
"In contrast to the addressed or invoked models of audience, the involved audience is an actual participant in the writing process who creates knowledge and determines much of the content of the discourse. […] [T]he involved audience brings the audience literally into the open, making the intended audience a visible, physical, collaborative presence" (Johnson, 1997, p. 363). |
Facebook "Wall" conversation. |
In certain forms of Web-based self-presentation, especially the ones available on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, the audience is actually involved in shaping the discourse.
Get Involved In Your Community
Ways that an audience is involved in Web-based self-presentation:
- Expressions from the audience such as “woos,” “snaps,” rankings, “testimonials” and commenting systems, including “The Wall” on Facebook and the comment systems in place on sites such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and MySpace.
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Friendster comments and testimonials page. |
The presence of comments and feedback from an audience makes them visibly present and involved.
Will You Be My Friend?
- The act of “friending” and the subsequent display of “friends lists” or other indications of the networks to which one belongs.
- Audience involvement is common: a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project claims that “More than 4 in 5 social network users (84%) have posted messages to a friend’s profile or page.”
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LiveJournal profile page. |
This is especially true for teens, for whom “blogs are much more about the maintenance and extension of personal relationships” and for whom “blogs are often authored with select audiences in mind” (Pew Internet and American Life Project, “Teen Content Creators and Consumers,” 2006b).
Wikiality
Richard Woods (2006), in a commentary on the divide between digital natives and digital immigrants, says that parameters are increasingly set by
"wiki-thinking," peer groups exchanging ideas through digital networks. […] A telling symptom is blogging. Where once schoolchildren and students confided only in their diaries, now they write blogs or entries on MySpace.com — where anyone can see and comment on them."
I like using the term "wikiality" (coined on The Colbert Report) to describe this phenomenon as well.
Conclusions
While sometimes people might be unaware of audience when they engage in Web-based self-presentation, that's not the only reason why people make seemingly inappropriate choices when they post online. As scholars and educators, we need to consider how the following things shape the decision making processes and content generated by people writing on/for the Web:
- technologies which (re)mediate the presentation of content
- assumptions about audience
- the audience itself
What else am I missing?