An Exploration into the Role of Audience in the Composition Process

Samuel Wirth

 

In many ways, the audience of a piece is what defines its understanding. Within a genre there are imbedded implications towards its effect on an audience and in what manners of rhetoric a message can be conveyed. Successful rhetors take into consideration what advantages they have within a chosen genre and how to most effectively employ them in communication of an idea. The composition process is directly the flow of a message, defined by its composer’s rhetorical situation, to a receptive audience in order to evoke change desired by the rhetor. Without any of these things there is no composition. The audience is the most difficult aspect of the composition process as in order to inspire the desire for change within an audience, a work must be composed with its audience in mind. While there are examples of serendipitous change through misinterpretation, Simon Bikindi’s song “The Awakening” comes to mind, this cannot be considered rhetoric as the message is derived from the audience’s perception independently rather than through the composer’s intentions.

In his online comic, “You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you”, artist Matthew Inman explores the unconscious bias people have when exposed to new information. Inman writes in a manner in which he attempts to predict the audience’s reactions in order to better craft his message. For example, he anticipates that his audience will assume his purpose in writing the comic as it progresses so he instead gives the comic a nondescript title and puts limited amounts of text on each panel. In this way, Inman counteracts the audience’s tendency to jump to conclusions and is able to introduce his idea more slowly. Another strategy Inman employs is presenting the idea of biases as unconscious and common rather than singling out the reader as inferior or flawed, which would risk inciting the reader and losing the possibility of educating him or her.

Inman must write in a way that avoids the topic he is intending to write about. Because the idea that we are unresponsive to concepts that undermine our core beliefs in itself undermines the core beliefs of the audience, he uses tactics that force the reader to experience his comic slowly and think about what he is saying rather than reacting viscerally. One way in which Inman controls the speed at which the audience experiences his comic is by using long panels with few words. In this aspect, the genre of a web comic has more utility than a text based medium of a similar genre would. Unlike a work such as an essay or an article, it is difficult or impossible to skim a comic. Even if the reader was to scroll quickly through the comic or zoom out in his or her browser view, the text would not be legible.

Poet Billy Collins uses similar techniques to Inman in his commencement address to the 2003 graduating class of Choate Rosemary hall. Collins’s purpose is to inspire the graduates to appreciate the small parts of life; however, rather than condemn their current way of life, Collins frames his message as the next logical step in the graduates’ lives. He acknowledges that the demands of college studies drive students to live a fast-paced lifestyle but, as graduation is a time of transition, Collins’s audience is more receptive to his advice. Additionally, rather than introduce his idea of slowing down in life as a reversal of the graduate’s current lifestyle, Collins uses phrases such as “The danger in all this haste” and “How can we avoid being so caught up” in order to portray the pressures of life as outside forces. In this way, the lifestyle changes that Collins suggests are not internalized as personal attacks but rather as strategies to avoid a previously unknown evil.

            In the same way as Inman, Collins has control over the consumption speed of his work because of the genre of a commencement address. By nature, a commencement address holds a captive audience; the graduates are not allowed to leave until Collins has finished speaking. Collins has complete liberty over the inflection, tempo, and duration of his speech assuming that the college provided him an allotted time. In this way, the audience must experience his work in the prescribed way, demonstrating genre’s control over audience. Unfortunately, the advantages Collins had due to his original audience and medium are lost in the digital transcript of his speech. The reader can skim his speech, leave the page at any time, and cannot replicate the inflection or tempo Collins used in his original presentation. Here, both the audience and medium of the work change, from an audial speech presented to a live audience to a transcript available in text only to internet users. However, the genre itself did not change; the work is still a commencement address, albeit a transcript. Its possible then that the captive audience was not an aspect of the genre but rather a part of the medium: a speech.

            Samuel Gosling explores the importance of a medium and its effect on an audience in his study on how people interpret meaning from inspecting rooms. Gosling takes a more liberal approach to the idea of media; rather than as an avenue of presenting a message to an audience e.g. written text, audio, or a visual image, the medium explored in Gosling’s research is a room. This medium has more incidental implications towards audience than other media; the way the audience interprets the messages within a room are more abstract and subconscious.

Additionally, it could be said that a room is neither a genre of its own nor a medium but rather a direct extension of the rhetorical situation. The aspects of a room are so subconscious within a composer’s mind that there is no composition process involved. No choice of genre is ever considered and, unless the owner is expecting guests, little thought is given towards an audience. In this way, Gosling is placing an audience, the snoopers, upon a medium which usually has none. This allows the audience’s reaction to be studied more serendipitously. Because there is no preconceived notion of the genre of a room, the audience reacts only to the individual parts of the room; that is, the parts and not their sum. This would be as the same as if an audience could react only to the colors of a photograph, the lighting, or perhaps the perspective, but not recognize what the picture is of. From this is can be suggested that the audience gets much meaning from the aspects of a genre, in addition to the aspects of the work itself.

            In his piece, “The Rhetorical Situation”, Lloyd F. Bitzer suggests a different idea. Rather than deriving directly from the composer’s rhetorical situation, under Bitzer’s framework, the aspects of a room come from exigences that appear in life. Exigences are a figurative “missing link” between the rhetorical situation and the audience; they are the demand of action that drives an author to compose within their rhetorical situation for an audience. There is some evidence of this in Gosling’s research for individuals place objects in their room as a way to solidify their personal identity. Here, the exigence for identity pushes the individual to make a design choice for a personal audience: themself. Another example would be design choices that convey something to others or as a way of identifying within a group. Here there is a social exigence to express oneself or to fit in. Thus, under this logical framework there is a composition process in the designing of a space, even if partially subconscious. The transition from rhetorical situation to a message to an audience would have some conscious choice rather than being dictated solely by a direct expression of rhetorical situation.

            It can be seen now that there may be aspects of composition in media that do not fit the original descriptor. While not a direct rhetorical process from rhetorical situation to audience, meaning can be found by an audience that is indicative of the composer’s subconscious decisions. While this is not composition in the sense described, it does represent transmission of a message to an audience by a composer. What it lacks however is communication. The noted example, a living space, lacks communication towards the audience and instead derives its communicatory property from the preconceived notions of the audience in the same way that an audience can find meaning directly from the genre of a piece. The experiences of the audience then, outside of the work, are integral to the rhetorical process as it is only through the integration and altering of the audience’s experience that change can be evoked.