Paralleled Power Over Audience

In this essay, Ong explores the concepts of the projected audience and the fictionalized audience while applying a reader-response criticism in the article. One of Ong’s most prominent arguments in the first half of the article is that the audience is further away in time and space for the writer compared to the orator, leaving the writer to fictionalize or project an earlier audience to write to or for rather than address. This implies that writers create roles for readers (in the plural sense rather than collective) in an attempt to control how the reader interprets their work. It also implies a power dynamic that the writer has to the audience. The writer must project or fictionalize readers’ roles due to the inability to speak to the audience in person. In reader-response criticism, the writer calls its audience to actively read and connect with the text. By demanding that role of the audience, Ong paves the way for diversity of readers’ responses (without requiring direct communication) the same way Ong and other rhetoricians have reacted to Plato and Aristotle, or students with teachers’ lectures. If this practice has been recycled throughout time despite evolving mediums or agents, then there must also be a distance between orators and their audiences.

Many traditional rhetoricians believed they possessed a special and prestigious role in society, similar to how Ong explains that writing/literacy is imperious, which required them to address audiences to give them a sense of morality. These rhetorical orators believed their moral rules or “ideologies” had to be followed because they possessed an inherent Supreme Good, which is why many traditional rhetoricians (if not all) dedicated their lives to political science. I notice a parallel in the power dynamic between “reader-response criticism” and the relationship of rhetoricians/orators and audiences. On the surface level, both agents share knowledge or “facts” with their audience to interpret, study, criticize, and possibly follow or challenge. In a closer look, both relationships establish an authority over their audience through the platform they communicate in, such as speeches or written texts, no matter how the audience is made up. 

Ong calls for an active reading process by raising theoretical questions to help the readers understand the possible meanings by which the text is to be interpreted, and by “citing direct references to reading in the text being analyzed in order to justify the focus on reading and show that the world of the text is continuous with the reader’s world” (Bedford Glossary 425). A theoretical question Ong asks in the article is, “In-close subject matter is supposed to solve the problem of invention. Of course it does not. The problem is not simply what to say but also whom to say it to. Say?” (11). By singling the word “Say” and posing it as a question, Ong reminds the reader to remain focused on the meaning of his explanation, even in the language he uses to explain it. He calls for the reader to not overlook any element of his explanation, since it all ties back to his intended meaning, which is that the writer can never “say” anything, therefore, leaving him/her to fictionalize or project an audience. In the article, Ong cites many direct references to show how the relationship of writer-audience has changed over time since the invention of writing to script culture and to literature. He uses the example of author Jane Austen to explain the tension between early authors connecting with their audience. “Nervousness regarding the role of the reader registers everywhere in the ‘dear reader’ regularly invoked in fiction well through the 19th century. The reader had to be reminded (and the narrator, too) that the recipient of the story was indeed a reader—not a listener, not one of the crowd, but an individual isolated with a text.” (17). By incorporating this reference, Ong reminds his audience that this is a problem that has always been prominent to writers, and not a conclusion he has drawn on his own without first conducting proper research. 

In the case study of Nike’s “Girl Effect” campaign, there is also a reader-response relationship with its projected audience similar to how I. A. Richards argues that “readers’ feelings and experiences provide a kind of reality check, a way of testing the authenticity of emotions and events represented in literary works.” (Bedford Glossary 425). The ad campaign also uses common spaces in regards to a collective feeling people have felt towards other public campaigns with an ethical call-to-action. A video oftentimes uses audience-building strategies of both orators and writers due to the ability to visually demonstrate and construct a written/oral narrative. This indeed calls the video-maker to project or fictionalize an audience. In this case study, the audience is projected because the campaign addresses similar narratives, visuals, and facts that their projected audience has presumably experienced. It then changes that around in order to strengthen their message and narrative of the ad campaign. In the opening line of the “I Dare You” video of the campaign, the narrator says “I dare you to look at me and see only a statistic,” with the image of a child who visually resonates to those call-to-action commercials that ask for monetary donations. In that video, as well as the other two videos, it specifically states that it is not money the campaign is searching for. Both of these implemented strategies in the campaign would not work if the audience had not been projected and if the audience did not respond by playing their respective role. If the audience happens to consist of people who have never seen any kind of call-to-action commercials that ask for monetary donations, then the meaning of Nike’s “Girl Effect” campaign might not be as it is intended.