"Embracing Digital Literacies: A Study of First-Year Students’ Digital Compositions"

Managing an Audience

Further evidence of students’ strong audience awareness is found in the measures they take to limit, control, and monitor possible viewers of their writing. danah boyd’s (2007) research of My Space users discusses how teens sometimes create dual profiles to avoid parental disapproval or censure. One profile is the “G-rated” version, which contains content that meets the expectations and rules of the parent or guardian. Parents are given access to this profile by their child. Content that teens deem unacceptable to a parental audience is displayed on a second, private account. The second account uses “fake names and details,” and contains the material teens want to include, but which may be offensive to parents (p. 132). Through creative measures, teenagers and students alike endeavor to control what particular audience members see, demonstrating their knowledge of the important role audience plays in the rhetorical situation and in composing a text. In this study, several students discussed how they block unwanted audience members to actively control who sees what, thus targeting their writing for a more specific group of peers. For instance, students use blocking and viewing features on Facebook so that they can limit unwanted comments and conversations.

Natalie, a blogger who enjoys writing what she calls blog “rants,” described how she initially posted these rants on Facebook for a select group of friends. On one occasion, Natalie wrote about her view on her school district’s financial problems. She explained that she only wanted selected friends to be able to view the writing because “I didn’t want … [other] people commenting on it with … weird stuff. [I] tried to stay away from that. I just wanted my friends to see it.” By using Facebook features to only allow targeted audiences to view certain writings, Natalie can partially control the kind of response she will receive and avoid the negative comments she might have received from a more public audience.

Emily, a student who frequently reflects on how her public, digital writings may be viewed by others, discussed how online writings on social networking websites can be used to attack and publicly embarrass writers or their audience. Emily tries to stay out of the “drama” on social networking sites by removing pictures, posts, or “tags” that link her name and profile to arguments or other conversations she does not want to be connected to. (Tags are labels that act as a digital indexing system. Placing a tag on a text connects other Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or blog writings that have the same tag.) She explained:

You can definitely get someone under their skin and make it really public. As soon as you post something on someone’s status, if you really want to get to someone and you really don’t care, everyone is going to see it [and] people are going to jump in and it’s going to turn into a way bigger issue than it should have been.

Students like Emily understand, and have seen, the material effects of writing tags on a status or post. Since tags can be used to cue specific, targeted audiences, as Emily notes, they can also be used to embarrass peers. Emily demonstrates a keen awareness of audience through her understanding of the interdependent relationship between writers and their audiences.

Ryan also discussed how tagging can help determine the kind of audience he wants (or does not want) to have. Ryan enjoys reading and writing blog posts through Tumblr, a blogging and social networking website. When he is writing on Tumblr, he recognizes that the number and type of tags he assigns to a blog post will help determine his audience:

[It]…depend[s] on what tags you put on your post. If you don’t tag your post, no one will see it except people on their dashboard [or people who were already subscribed to Ryan’s blog]. Lots of times I won’t put too many tags, but if I’m writing something about an issue that I want a lot of people to see it, I’ll put a whole bunch of tags on it.

Ryan points out that normally only people who are already following his blog will see his posts. However, if he wants a wider audience, placing tags on his blog post will link his writing to other posts with the same tag, making his blog entry more easily found by other Tumblr users. When Ryan publishes on Tumblr, he decides which writings would be meaningful to his more familiar audience of blog followers and which writings would appeal to the broader, Tumblr community. Through tagging, Ryan determines how public he should make a particular blog post.

Writers like Ryan, Emily, and Natalie use features available online to limit or manage audiences, displaying their knowledge of the rhetorical situation of a specific text. These students understand how their writing must play to certain audience expectations. When Ryan, Emily, and Natalie compose online, they decide which audience is most appropriate to address, and limit their audience accordingly.