Ong and Barthes: Construction of Audience and its Shifting Modern Significance

As writers, insofar as we strive to be insightful, compelling, and entertaining ones, we often face an objective myriad of hurdles, be it challenges of maintaining the attention of our readers, internal strife over crucial stylistic choices, or even just struggling to imagine the real context of our piece's use. The more I read on rhetorical theory, the more I begin to realize such common obstacles are at once innately connected to one another and yet often hold individually-defined solutions.  Ong reassures us that writers must plant and sustain a certain "fictionalization" of their audiences in order to make their pieces blossom with resonance to the most distant of readers, yet also highlights that the process is more often than not a relative procedure, so long as it operates smoothly enough within the boundaries of its readers' culture and assumptions.  In attempting to dissect Ong's ideas with respect to a modern audience, do his ideas still hold true? At what point do issues of hypertext, multimodality, and technological immediacy in general begin to skew the data? No doubt the culture of 2015 is a bit removed from that of 1975, but certain tenets of readership laid out by Ong and Barthes persist today, if in a more fittingly accessible variety.


Ong both reignites and attempts to solve our worries and curiosities about the nature of identifying with our audience early on in his essay, maintaining that a writer must cast an audience in "some sort of role," (Ong 13) and that the audience must, in turn, "fictionalize" themselves. I believe this instruction is fertile ground to explore in the modern day.  I begin to wonder how aspects of contemporary technologically-tethered society are related to those of the historical eras of writing that Ong chronicles in his essay chronologically.  Does the often image-centric language of technology echo the sentiments of antiquated oral tradition that placed great emphasis on presentation?  Arguably both mediums construct their audience through realizing the mass assumptions about the nature of the human condition present to their culture -- an Internet joke featuring a video clip that satirically criticizes current socio-political systems is perhaps akin to the pontifications of a Victorian playwright's co-main character who might jocularly and subtly speculate on the lies of his own culture.

Both the playwrights of the sixteenth century and the informal Tumblr user share a common, if trite, aim -- to give their pieces worth.  Ong smartly noted that the times and culture of an era often dominate the products of composition, if in an indirect manner.  He remarks that the aim of sixteenth and seventeenth-century poets and composers often lent itself to manners of "teach[ing]...pleas[ing]," and the like, and contrasts this notion with more modern goals of readership immersion, pointing to Hemingway's casual, "tight-lipped" diction. But my query is this: how does the modern immediacy of text, image, and in many cases, video, our best attempt at a bona fide virtual realm, affect this distinction?

Perhaps textual immediacy and graphics and the insidious nature of digital information lend some laziness on the part of the composer -- that is, if the composer is to be defined as any producer of digital content -- in that relatively less initial thought is required to connect with an audience, being that works written pre-Internet might have entailed more thoughtful consideration with respect to pleasing an audience, reaching out to connect with audiences with far different backgrounds or situations.  But perhaps this is subjective measuring -- digitally composed material holds the benefit of potentially unmatched exposure, and thus digitally created material, in order to appeal to its audience, might be expected to extend olive branches to all manner of readers, or at least be concise and meaningful enough to strike a common chord with the masses.

Barthes contends that our perception of "author" (Barthes 875) must humbly accept the role of the back-burner, and that in order to really understand a work, we must delicately balance our own preconceptions and experience with the author and the language themselves.   I think this is a worthy and well-stated notion, and at once it is yet another idea that appears to shift critically in a technological age. Some of our most adored tendencies as digital readers lie in "following" certain feeds or users, "tracking" activities of the people or organizations we find most interesting, and so forth.  Perhaps this is a matter of convenience -- it is much easier to find certain nodes of alignment in the vast void that is the Internet -- but I believe this behavior might also call into question the notions of Barthes' warnings of author identification.  At what point do hordes of Internet followers realize there is inherent worth in examining each document as a piece of writing wholly separate from its author?  Can we quiet our own personal notions easier in a modern age, in order to more purely be, as Barthes reckons, "born again with the text?"  (Barthes 873) Countering Barthes, and perhaps qualifying the ideas of Ong, is it really necessary to do this in a digital age?  When the lines of authorship are blurred in some digital content, procedures of worthy consideration take on new meanings.  Where Barthes contends that authorship is shared by the "author" and the reader, I see immediate relevance to a digital age -- much of Web content consists of edits and revisions tacked on to existing works, remixes and the like -- a sort of visceral re-iteration of Barthes' sentiment.

It is always necessary, I think, to consider the role of the author, work, and reader consciously. The edges of author, audience, and content appear to be grayed by time.  Modern pieces carry much worth because they echo some bit of current collectivism, and are being originally born with a contemporary audience, while antiquated texts offer us a piece of history with many voices chiming in on it over the eras.

Barthes reminds us that the "reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone..." and I believe Ong tries to clarify how we conquer this obstacle by drawing on "shared experiences," a sentiment that may well be redefined each year, something that we as writers must consistently be aware.