{"id":886,"date":"2003-10-29T12:51:06","date_gmt":"2003-10-29T12:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntu.my\/wp30\/archives\/2003\/10\/29\/understanding_an_audience.html"},"modified":"2003-10-29T12:51:06","modified_gmt":"2003-10-29T12:51:06","slug":"understanding_an_audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2003\/10\/29\/understanding_an_audience.html","title":{"rendered":"understanding an audience"},"content":{"rendered":"

In questioning if i was a blogger<\/a>, i started wondering about conceptions of audience in blogging.<\/p>\n

Somewhere i once read that there are two types of bloggers. The first produces material in a journalist-esque fashion. They see their audience as public and are always a bit surprised when those close to them read their stuff. The second produces material in a journal fashion. They see their audience as private and are always a bit startled when the world reads them.<\/p>\n

I’m definitely in both camps, or neither. My audience is primarily me. Even my best friend doesn’t read my blog. In fact, most of the people that i truly think of as only friends (and not also colleagues) never read my blog. I’m always absolutely surprised to go to a party and be told about my blog. I’m also surprised to hear from strangers about my blog.<\/p>\n

What is an audience? So, while i say that my audience is me, that’s not really true. Most of the tone of this blog is veiled. It’s pretty non-controversial. It’s fairly boring. I don’t write about my adventures, my sinful engagements or my emotional trials. Sure, folks make guesses about me as a person based on my content, but that’s often misleading. For example, the reasons that i pay attention to drug and sex and teenager culture have quite rich explanations, but it’s easy to make assumptions. I allow that slippage though because i don’t want to appear so wholesome. Thus, the i know that the constructed identity is biased and i often encourage that bias<\/p>\n

Audience is *so* essential. There is no way to present information without understanding who is reading it, what their biases\/experiences are, and how you are being read. We write in a void, unlcear of how people are reading us. We write to the ether, yet i take for granted so many assumptions about my audience. I assume that i’m speaking to educated, conscientious people with like minds… i assume i’m preaching to the choir (but all readers of misbehaving<\/a> will know that i’m learning this lesson the hard way).<\/p>\n

In order to blog, we need to either define our audiences on our site (locally controlled context creation), be totally low self-monitors, or be really consciously uncontroversial. Usually, i tend towards the latter. I’m a complete high self-monitor and security through obscurity isn’t working… somehow, i stopped being obscure.<\/p>\n

I worry about this aspect of blogging. Will bloggers just be the low self-monitors and those of us who don’t put our vulnerabilities forward? What’s the impact of putting your vulnerabilities forward. Have others gotten hurt?<\/p>\n

Hmm…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In questioning if i was a blogger, i started wondering about conceptions of audience in blogging. Somewhere i once read that there are two types of bloggers. The first produces material in a journalist-esque fashion. They see their audience as public and are always a bit surprised when those close to them read their stuff. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}