Where does audience collide?

The people a speaker or writer aims to persuade, whose beliefs, values, and disposition shape what counts as a good argument. Aristotle's Rhetoric (around 350 B.C.E.) treated the listener as the endpoint of persuasion and sorted speeches by the kind of hearer addressed, and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1958 The New Rhetoric refined this into the idea of a universal audience, the imagined body of all reasonable people to whom a sound argument should appeal. The referent is a rhetorical target defined by who must be convinced, not the receivers of a mass medium or a person whose behaviour changes because others are watching.[1][2]

Unit

One argumentative situation and the hearers it must convince, particular or universal

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed by close reading of a text or speech for the audience it constructs and the appeals aimed at it

The change in a person's performance that occurs simply because other people are present and watching. Triplett's 1898 study The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition found that cyclists and children wound fishing reels faster when others were present, and Zajonc's 1965 Social facilitation gathered such findings into a general account in which the presence of observers raises arousal and strengthens whichever response is dominant, helping easy tasks and hurting hard ones. The referent is a measurable shift in behaviour caused by being observed, not the group a speaker sets out to persuade or the receivers of a mass medium.[3][4]

Unit

One task performed alone versus before observers, compared for output

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Measured experimentally as the difference in speed, accuracy, or output between observed and unobserved conditions

The body of people who receive and interpret the messages of a mass medium such as radio, television, or the press. Lasswell's 1948 The structure and function of communication in society named the receiver, the "to whom" of the communication act, as one of its basic parts, and later work recast that receiver as active: Hall's 1980 Encoding/decoding argued that viewers read a message in ways the sender does not fully control, and Ang's 1991 Desperately Seeking the Audience examined how broadcasters try, and struggle, to know this dispersed public. The referent is a dispersed public defined by its consumption and reading of media content, not the hearers a single speaker aims to persuade or the observers whose presence alters a performer's behaviour.[5][6][7]

Unit

A population of receivers of a media message, counted as reach or described by its readings

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Estimated by ratings, circulation, and reach figures, and studied qualitatively through reception and ethnographic research