Death of the Audience, or at least what you think the audience is.

Walter Ong’s, “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction” takes this commonplace idea of audience and breaks it down in a way that completely abandons our traditional ideas of it. Ong dissects the term in regards to its relationship to the delivery of a text, more specifically written and oral delivery. He begins with a criticism of current modern discussions of rhetoric by claiming they are typically only concerned with one method of delivery or the other, rather than the audience themselves.  He also notes the lack of discussion on the relationship between a speaker’s audience and a writer’s audience. In his essay Ong attempts to identify and break down the differences between an oratory audience and a writer’s audience. In fact he makes a point to explain that the term “audience” is inappropriate when describing a writer’s audience because they are not physically in front of he or she like a speaker’s audience is. It is because of this dilemma that Ong claims a writer must take a different approach to his readers then a speaker takes with their audience. A speaker audience includes intimacy and context that a writer’s audience could never have, and this affects ones reception of a text. Additionally there is a greater sense of “group dynamic” with a speaker’s audience, as they all share the same circumstances surrounding whatever text they’re receiving and this causes them to understand it relatively equally.

The same is not true of a writer’s audience, or as Ong claims, readers. A writer’s readers are individualized in a way that the speaker’s audience is not. The writer fictionalizes his readers, as they don’t actually become real until after the writer has already delivered the text. This is a challenge that Ong exemplifies in his discussion of a student being assigned the task of writing about how they spent their summer vacation. Ong posits, in what realistic setting would they student need to discuss this information, and to whom? He points out that it is only in this particular situation that the student would ever write this to his teacher. However for the purposes of the assignment, the student must construct an audience to write his story to. Ong goes on to explain the idea of a fictional audience as well as how the writer must essentially “cast” his or her audience into a specific role in order to construct their text appropriately. Not only this but the audience must also work with the writer to fictionalize themselves and work within the role they have been assigned.

This process is seen in the fictionalization of the audience for Disney’s Princess and the Frog. The creators of the film fictionalized a particular audience for the film that they knew it would appeal to. They fictionalized several different audiences but the most important perhaps was African Americans who felt a lack of representation in Disney films. The inclusion of an African American princess was no accident. It was intentionally created and structured to fulfill a need in the African American community for film representation. When discussion readers and their role as fictionalizers of themselves, Ong states that every individual will not be able to fit into the mold the writer provides them with. This all depends on an individual’s knowledge and level of ignorance. We see this idea in Disney fictionalization of another audience in Princess and the Frog. The creators assume their audiences will be people who know the traditional story of the Princess and the Frog.  However when young kids who have never heard the story go see the film, they are unable to fictionalize themselves into that role.  Therefore the text serves a different purpose for them.

Ong’s essay analyzes of the differences between a speaker’s audience and a writers audience in regards to how the information was delivered. Ong talks about how information delivered from a speaker to their audience is more specifically related to what the speaker wants to say. Where as the writer is more self-sufficient in that he is not connected to his readers like a speaker is to their audience. Therefore he must build his audience. Ong is essentially arguing that the speaker must tailor his or her information to their audience and a writer tailors his or her audience to their information. The writer’s readers then insert themselves into the role that has been laid out for them, serving as the fictionalized audience.

I agree with Ong that the reception of information by an audience is changed by factors such as context and intimacy that you find with oratory speech. However where I find faults in Ong’s argument is that it doesn’t seem to take into consideration all the different kinds of speakers. Ong argument works best when thinking of a speaker talking to an intimate audience, one with which he is familiar. However I believe that when you start considering that many types of speakers, for example motivational speakers who may speak to 1,000 people at a time, it is easier to find some flaws. When creating his or her speech that speaker, like a writer, must fictionalize their audience. The fact that their text is delivered in front of a physical audience does change the fact that prior to the actually delivery, the speech had to be prepared for an unknown, or imaginary audience.  I just found this idea interesting and wondered how Ong would combat these ideas.