Fictionalizing Children as an Audience

Walter Ong writes that, when a student is presented with a generic prompt and asked to produce text or work, “The student is not talking. He is writing. No one is listening. There is no feedback. Where does he find his "audience"? He has to make his readers up, fictionalize them” (11). This reminds me of why Socrates prolifically prefered spoken as opposed to written rhetoric: the ability to argue back and forth on a point. The interaction of writer and reader here is so simple and seamless that it hardly needs explanation at all. However, when it comes to content that is viewed, read, or consumed without the ability of immediate interaction with the characters, writers, or the text or work in general, we must ponder on how we construct the audiences we create content for, and how we as audience members in an infinite amount of content interact with the creators of those entities.

Could it be that in fact audiences and the writers construct meaning in unison? When a piece of content presents itself as a Text and not a Work, two terms that come from our earlier Aristotle reading, I find this to be the case. When I viewed the items under the second bullet under Case Studies, I found content that was familiar to me and easy to examine. Simple scenes, almost exclusively deriving from films primarily directed towards the attention of children audience members. This seems easily implied as I observe them now, but how did the writers and producers of these films cater to the attention of children? Not only to one child, but to thousands? Millions? What about the other audience members (people like me, who just enjoy watching Disney movies?)

Ong asks, “What do we mean by saying the audience is a fiction? Two things at least. First, that the writer must construct in his imagination, clear or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role-entertainment seekers, reflective sharers of experience (as those who listen to Conrad's Marlow), inhabitants of a lost and remembered world of prepubertal latency (readers of Tolkien's hobbit stories), and so on. Second, we mean that the audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself. A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life” (12). The clips (and the writers) from the case study option ask the audience members to put themselves into a specific role, one that can conceivably believe in things like a human turning into a frog, or one that can conceptualize a cartoon rendering as a representation of real life. The writers also make a set of assumptions about the audience: have they heard of the princess and the frog storybefore? If not, let’s show them the story book.

In the Enchanted clip, the audience is assumed to either

1. know the stereotypes surrounding Disney princess films and are aware of the irony of the scene, or 
2. be a child who doesn’t care about irony and wants to see a girl in a dress sing a song with birds.  

Even if the audience is neither of these, the writers can further fictionalize potential audience by also catering to audiences with no prior knowledge of Disney films or the movie genre. In here and the other clips provided, it seems that the meaning of each video is constructed partially from writing and production catering to an audience, and partially from the assumptions the audience makes about the work itself. “Even today we do not talk in other contexts quite the kind of language in which we tell fairy stories to children. "Once upon a time," we begin. The phrase lifts you out of the real world” (Ong 15). It's not just a move to capture the children's attention when we create content catered to  them: it's also an invitation to an interactive experience where they can learn the songs, do the  dances, cosplay, and whatever else a child might like to do when presented with a "princess film".