(x-posted at Cac.ophony.org: please visit to comment)

In this final segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at the “Mother of the All Funk Chords,” a Youtube mashup by the Israeli musician Kutiman, they discuss the implications of the notion that “you choose a channel; your audience will choose the channels after that.”

This video is 12 minutes long.

(x-posted at Cac.ophony.org: please visit to comment)

(x-posted at Cac.ophony.org: please visit to comment)

In this second segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at an advertisement from Kaplan University (featuring Uncle Phil) and explore the nature of authenticity and credibility in a Web 2.0 world, the implications of tools that empower the audience on “for-profit” higher education, and the challenges producers of information have in maintaining control over their intended messages once they get out.

(x-posted at Cac.ophony.org: please visit to comment)

One of the challenges of producing content in the Web 2.0 world is developing an awareness of the audience for whom we are producing.

In this blog post, the Internet artist Ze Frank deconstructs the process by which he imagines his audience,  and explores the particular challenges posed by collaborative work. In many cases, one’s vision of the audience is jumbled; Frank argues that this makes producing work online very exciting, but can also pose challenges for one’s critical eye.  He suggests some methods for envisioning the audience:

When you write a comment, or a facebook status update, or anything that goes out to a group of people – pay attention to how you imagine it being perceived. Are you imagining each person individually? Have you created some in proxy individual for the group? Are you aware of an unknown audience? What are they like? Is there a mood associated with them? How did it all come to be?

He also suggests some methods for embedding a vision of the audience into collaborative work:

First you can directly state what you consider to be the intended audience: “write as if speaking to a child”, or “give advice to new buyers”. Second, you can reference a specific style (which takes the place of an audience): “like a soap opera”, “in the style of an encyclopedia”. And third, you can add a “final presentation” to the project: “Fifty entries will be displayed at this location when the project is done” or “images will be included in a book”. This at least creates a shared context for how all the contributions will be viewed, and can point to a broader audience (this ad will be shown during the superbowl), or to a very specific audience (this will be displayed at the children’s hospital).

Finally, Frank asks several well-known artists and writers how they view their audiences as they work, and offers some additional thoughts in response to emails after about his original post.

Here’s a 1996 article by Nick Gillespie entitled, “View Masters: The Audience’s Power Over Media’s Message, that appeared in Reason magazine. In it, Gillespie deftly considers, among other things, the relationship between audiences, passivity and consumerism. It’s a bit old and dated in some significant ways (much has happened since 1996 after all), but provocative and interesting nonetheless. Here’s a brief excerpt:

The notion of TV viewers and consumers of pop culture as intellectual couch potatoes closely parallels longstanding conventional scholarly analyses of how popular culture works. As with the political consensus, the intellectual indictment crosses traditional right/left boundaries. Critics usually charge that pop culture, in seeking the broadest audience possible, appeals to the lowest common denominator and thereby cheapens and coarsens society. Most critics take the argument a step further and claim that, even as pop culture gives the people what they want, it destroys consumers’ critical faculties, effectively infantalizing them.

Consider, for instance, conservative Allan Bloom’s commentary on rock music. In The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Bloom writes, “[R]ock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire–not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored….My concern here is not with the moral effects of this music–whether it leads to sex, violence, or drugs. The issue here is its effect on education, and I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.”

Television can lay claim to the status of most-favored punching bag and academic attacks on the small screen are representative of broader indictments of pop culture. Watching the idiot box, goes the argument, turns viewers into idiots. As their titles suggest, books such as The Plug-In Drug, Media: The Second God, The Glass Teat (and its sequel, The Other Glass Teat), and Telegarbage attempt to detail just how horrible and intellectually enervating the medium actually is.

Boxed In: The Culture of TV (1988), by Mark Crispin Miller, a left-leaning media critic and professor at Johns Hopkins University, provides a good example. “Those who have grown up watching television are not, because of all that gaping, now automatically adept at visual interpretation. That spectatorial `experience’ is passive, mesmeric, undiscriminating, and therefore not conducive to the refinement of the critical faculties,” writes Miller.

Read the whole article here.

Via Tech Crunch, an interesting article on the success of Twitter as a powerful means of communicating with a defined and focused audience. Here’s a juicy excerpt:

Back to Twitter: Why Audience works
Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it) and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and references in future conversations (online and offline).

Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has missed the full power of Audience so far.

Facebook: Designed for Audience?
Not so much. Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”

Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.

Read the whole article here.

Performance artists, choreographers, and playwrights have long experimented with means of drawing audience members into a performance, making them more than just viewers, but participants as well. This video of a live dance performance in the Liverpool train station in London orchestrated by T-Mobile as part of a marketing campaign shows us an interesting example of an attempt to blur the line between audience and performer. It also brings up interesting questions regarding the relationship between marketers and their audiences.  Is there more to say here about the role of the audience than that they were subtly coerced into participating in a clever publicity stunt?

Here’s an interesting “Making Of” video that sheds some light on how the performance came together.