When reading The Writer's Audience is Always A Fiction, I became stuck on the difference between a "reader" and an "audience" (11). It wasn't because I didn't understand what he had defined them as, it was because he didn't give the audience a singular property (because he claims that "audience" is a collective noun), but he gave the audience of a text a singular title. As stated, a collective group of people who listen to someone speak are audience members. But if they were to be separated into individual minds, aren't they also listeners? If we were to give them individual characteristics, much like he gives the readers of a text, then they would be technically considered "fiction," too.
Yet, I'm back where I started because they can't be fiction; they are physically seen when the speaker is delivering a speech. Ong gives the speaker's audience individual properties if the speaker were to ask the audience to read a section from a text (11). But they become readers because they are, well, reading. Ong addresses the difference between hearing and reading, and clearly the two are different. But which one requires more active skills? There is active reading and active listening. The entire listening audience, if it were one collective group, can't possibly be thinking the exact same thing at once. They would all have separate, although possibly similar, fragments being tossed around in their heads. So basically, what I'm getting at is the fallacy I see with addressing a listening audience as one entity, instead of several different thinkers.
Kaitlyn -
ReplyDeletePerhaps a helpful way to think about this would be that the writer - and the speaker - both "construct" their audiences. They shape their speaking and writing in ways they hope will appeal to and reach their audience, and to do so, they must imagine who will be their audience. It is the differences in these constructions that Ong's article addresses.
I think Ong might be getting at a slightly different thing when he states that a speaker's audience is a collective. I don't think he's denying that they are many different thinkers, rather, they are a collective because they are all in the same place, at the same time, experiencing the same text. Whereas, the writer's audience is not collective in the same sense: they are fragmented across time and space, and they are not all experiencing the same text together in the same environment.
The differences in how people in the same audience receive the same text differently is fascinating. I wonder how speakers and writers might account for these differences.
Rebekah