Lecture 4- Imagined audience and collapse context

- Look at at imagines audience, who is the blogger addressing their

blogs too
- Look at a concept of authenticity and why is important to the
audience
- Final part of lecture, watch a video who runs a course on mediated
ethnography
Context collapse
-

Refers to certain inherent determinacies

When communicating who do we think we are communicating
to
This concepts show what we think is okay to share
eg in terms of interpersonal meaning, what kind of things we
share
Consider question, what kinds of communicative situations are
you involved in
Appropriate in terms of genre

Who came up with it- Danah Boyd and Wesch

Context collapse
-

in relation to blogging practices

the problem facing the would be blogger it forces the
blogger to imaginemany possible others the viewer is

Generalised others
- Idea of generalised other- a kind of imagined co present third
party perspective latent in any communicative exchange
- the super addressee
- people will appeal to different generalised others, and its okay
as long as they are not in conflict in a particular
- Maintain face- politeness theory
Public/private
-

Though we add the self, many bloggers feel uneasy when

blogging context collapse takes on a new dimension in
which the collapse of infinite possible contexts, what we

The imagined audience

-

Closely related to context collapsed set up by marvick and

boyd

Virtually impossible to account to their potential audiences,

without know
The imagined audience is the mental conceptualisation of the
people with whom we are communicating with
Cognitive guide- super addressee, as a helper
The less we know about the audience, the more interpersonal
cues are reduced the more the interact
Unit of analysis is
Unit of observations- properties of the text e.g forms of
address or content analysis of interviews
Theorists would take on different kinds of unit of observations

Social media and imagined audiences

-

twitter more public to Facebook

aeene of being hidden amongst the trees as there is so much
how we change our communicative patterns
while anyone can read or see the content
what are the different cues in the social media environments
explore these patterns and cue and infer the imagined
audiences being invoked by the text
- eg what are clues are in this tect that can give you an idea of
who the imagined audience might be, so who are they talking
to? Hey guys- in particular white middle class Americanstalking about
Marwick and Boyd
-

I think I write to the people who I follow

Who are people tweeting to?

-

a lot of people tweet to themselves because they think no one

is listening to them
rhetorical context to imagined other, not talking to anyone in
particular
a performance to make a rhetorical point
dear is a common word to address the general public, centre
along with creating alignment

How can we study the imagined audiences?

-

Experimentally manipulate the audiences

Ask the subjects- like Boyd asks the authors who are they
talking to
Content analysis of tracing

Authenticity and audience

since authenticity is constituted by the audience , context

collapse
the different selves that we take on how to we here authentic
to our audience
interview method- as th
he isnt going to change his personality- they tweet genuinely
Imagine the audience as amy fellow nerd- in

Strategic audience
Authenticity
- Discourse about honesty, integrity,
- Home management
- Talking to other housewives and other mothers due to the
patterns of the
An anthropological introduction to YouTube
-

we know ourselves through how others know us

key concepts
-

notion of imagined audience, who are

generalised other- super addressee