How Imagining Being a Girl Can Change the World

Ong has a very interesting take on the ways that a rhetor should approach their audience - and that is by "constructing" it, or as in the title, imagining them as a fictional one. Early on within his essay, he differentiates how an orator and a writer have different kinds of challenges to address their audience successfully in order to effectively get their point across. In oratory rhetoric, an audience is singular, and based on certain notions said by the orator, the audience forms a collectivity that the orator can build from. Their audience is much more similar that the audience of a writer, likely being from a similar background since they are all gathered in a single spot to hear the orator's message. This aspect is absent from writing audiences, since each reader is receiving the information on an individual level. They could be from all kinds of different backgrounds and upbringings, so it is impossible for a writer to cater their message to each individual audience. So, this brings us to the critical discovery of the essay - that writers must efficiently "imagine" their audiences, or construct them, using the tone of their own voice and previous contexts. But this idea becomes complicated, as depending on how the writer chooses to display their own voice and tone, and who's voice they are trying to convey. For example, they must consider how the reader is reading their own voice; someone reading a Mark Twain novel, for example, will try to understand the work's voice, tone and purpose much differently than if they were to read a Donald Trump piece. Therefore, the writer must establish a certain level of credibility by creating their own, original voice and tone, so that the reader will absorb their writing's message in a way that they intended it to be.

To establish this original tone, the writer must then understand that throughout history, as stated by Ong, the reader is conforming to the thoughts and objects of the writer; this has no reflection their settings, or who they really are in real life. The writer sets this literary "reality" for them. This literary "reality" is built by forming a kind of imagined relationship with the reader. Ong goes in depth with this reader-writer relationship; many different writers form different relationships with their readers. Hemingway, as his example state, uses a "you-and-me" inflection of tone. He employs many indefinite articles, such as "this", "that" and "the" and leaves the readers to fill in the gaps by using implications from the reader's previous experiences. He gives the reader a great deal of credibility to understand his style of writing and the various messages he is attempting to convey.

A very different sort of tone arises from historical journalism; it uses "on-the-spot" experiences to convey the messages of the stories they are telling their readers, such as given example of the shared male camaraderie of sports or war. The major difference, here, is that Hemingway gives the reader's a high level of self esteem in the construction of what they believe is the intended message, while classic journalism expects the reader to bow down to the all knowing power of the journalistic source, with little interpretation and solely relies on similar, universal experiences.

This construction of audiences becomes even more complex in today's world of mass communication. There has never been a bigger disparage of knowledge than in today's world; if the demands for the audience's construction of the author's reality are too high or not relatable, the intended message for the intended audience will be unreachable. If one is not familiar with the tone of voice in the writing of Hemingway, his message may be lost. Ong goes on to give Sidney as an example to fix this dilemma: he focused on the purpose of writing to entertain or inform the audience of a message without much construction of the audience, there was no need for the sense of imagined community, all educated people could follow along and receive the message, without any familiarly with the author.

Then Ong goes to describe an important concept within his idea of a fictionalized audience to essentially refute Sidney's ideas: the audience readjustment. He gives the example of how even an orator has to fictionalize his audience to a degree, uses certain phrases to get them to listen in a certain context (he uses "once upon a time" to get an audience to listen in a way that is in a folk tale format). This interpretation is a 2 way street, as the audience listens and observes the tone of the orator. Writing is much more complicated than this, and is solely a one way street. He gives the example of how Chauncer in his Canterbury tales helps the medieval audience place themselves, and himself, within the multitude of stories of the individual characters within the tale. To expand on this idea, the reader is expected to be able to listen to different kinds of "tones" or have different "ears"; listen to political themes, for purposes of entertainment, or have an acceptance of conspiracy against the norm of society, etc.

Ong continues to explain that any genre of writing has a fictionalized audience; even the less expected ones, where the audience should be easy to construct, such as those of the genres of history, the personal letter and the diary. All of these should have a very simple audience to be able to construct, but is not the case. History is selective and interpretive; they construct their audience because there is no one thing to be said about anything, but there are many things to be said about one thing, to quote Ong himself. They write to capture the themes of various contexts of the people or events they are writing about, which he says in today's academic is even more complicated, because those in historical periods who could even read were generally all in the same context and the ideas were all generally accepted. In today's realm, the writer of history must think more critically to construct their audience, and what contexts of history and today they know and try to place them in.

Even personal letter writing and diary have a sense of imagining the reader, even when they definitely know who it is. Why is the audience reading it? When will they read it? What sort of mood are they in, and what kind of mood will this writing put them in? This among many other questions the writer must as themselves in order to effectively imagine their audience to convey the intended message.

These all show that, all in all, a writer must keep in mind that to construct an imagined audience, it is hard to break free from any kind of genre because of the contexts that the reader is ultimately going to interpret the writings in. To understand this complex critical idea of a constructed imagined audience to today's world of mass communication, we can apply it to the given ad campaign surround Nike's "The Girl Effect" Campaign.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8xgF0JtVg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q3YKqAZvrg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxV_o65nZYA

Nike starts off to construct their audience by beginning the first video with "I dare you to..." which adjusts them immediately to try and think outside of the contextual boxes of which they are used to. They then try to place the audience within the realm of the struggles of females, most specifically those in developing countries, as this context does not apply to girls above the poverty level in America and other first world countries. They are constructing the audience to view woman in a way that societies across the globe have conditioned them to view them in; not an object or a problem to be solved, but as a capable individual in which could be the solution to their own problems. It use a Sidney kind of construction, where the audience is one with universal knowledge. The second video of the series uses a more Hemingway-esque tone, beginning the message with the idea that there are many problems in today's world, such as poverty and unequally. But then they go on to invite their audience to see a hidden solution to all of these problems that many deem as an unconventional one; that women themselves can be the solution, not conventionally thought things like the government or money. The third video, now that the message and tone have been clearly conveyed to their imagined audience, is to adjust the audience that this solution to these problems are time sensitive. They use the convention "the clock is ticking" to give the audience a constructed feeling of urgency. They even directly tell the audience to imagine themselves as a poverty stricken 12 year old girl, and after some given time for the audience to do so, go along what the real life effects of this poverty will have of the child's life, as well as their children's and the society around them. The solution they provide is give the impoverished girl the opportunity to fix the problem that are afflicting them - the mood of urgency that the author began the message with is correlated with helping the impoverished girl before it is too late to change her life and end the cycle. This halting of the cycle with this unique solution is dubbed by Nike as "The Girl Effect", which is a good example of an author imagining and constructing an audience that can go across many cultures (given the language is translated) without much previous context, besides basic knowledge of the world, being needed.