This Rhetorical Life: The Interfaces of My Expertise
Podcast:
On this installment of This Rhetorical Life, we examine the way that comedian and author John Hodgman positions himself rhetorically with respect to his audiobook audience, and the similarities and differences between audience and user in Robert R. Johnson’s two essays. Issues of audience participation with respect to podcasting and YouTube are also discussed, as is the general and overarching idea that language is a technology.
(16 votes)
Comments
The Audience
Hi John,
Your integration of media in this podcast was quite effective and I enjoyed listening. Pace, timing, and your introduction was helpful too. Listening to the clip of John Hodgman, I identified with many of the attributes he described in his audience. In listing these qualities, Hoghman directed his appeal to a certain audience of listeners (while also revealing what he finds common or important among them). In a user-centered system, however, we know that he cannot make these same assumptions. This dovetails with the questions I posed in my podcast. What happens when we, as rhetoricians, designers, cannot effectively imagine our audience? How are we supposed to adjust our rhetorical approaches to a complex, changing context? White obviously idealizes this position and sees great potential in sizing the opportunity, but I am left wondering what tools we have to know what these opportunities are. It seems that Aristotle’s use of conventional wisdom does play a role here. Conventionally, listeners are those attributes described by Hodgman and he can expect them to be as such. But he does not know exactly how his work will be used or received and does not receive feedback (in a systematic way). He jokes that he would like to know his reader, to see them through a spy-camera in an effort to know the listener’s context. How do we become more effective rhetoricians and designers in this environment? An easy answer might be to incorporate users into the design process, but as you mentioned John, we are a global internet audience and no incorporation of users could truly encompass the desires, interests, experience, and needs of the global community. This question requires further exploration to be sure.
Thanks for your comment,
Thanks for your comment, Aubrey. I think all of the readings had a lot to say about audience without ever mentioning it directly, so I'm glad someone else picked up on this idea.
There's a lot to be said about being effective rhetoricians in this environment. I think it's especially interesting that at the time Hodgman recorded this we were talking about simple iPods for listening to audiobooks, and now we're dealing with smartphones and the like.
Most listening devices actually DO have tiny cameras in them now, and in an intriguing twist, some of those cameras [like in the iPhone 4] actually face the listener/user. Certainly something worth thinking about. Hodgman comes off as almost prescient [but still hilariously creepy].
Very Intriguing
I must say that I was rather impressed by your podcast. It was obvious that you were enthusiastic about the material and that caused me to be entusiastic to listen to your ideas, so kudos for that. Your decision to bring in the audiobook as an example is brilliant, it is something that everyone has listened to at least once it their life, making it mundane, and something that the user (or audience, as you put it) can not reply to or interact with at all. The clip you provided was an excellent choice and you used it wisely to bring Johnson's point that technology should be more user-centered home. The idea that we live in a world where we value stories of hardworking men and women who have invented some piece of technology that will change the world, and yet we pass over the people whose actual use of this technology allows for that change to occur, illustrates just how dense and closed-minded we are. When Johnson mentions that Edison invented the lightbulb, motion picture camera, and many other things, he neglects to even mention that Edison had actually taken these ideas from other people, hardly any of them were his own idea. So where does that fall in the designer-product-user dynamic? That is something that, while you never brought it up, came to my mind while listening to your podcast.
The music was well chosen and not distracting at all from the rest of the podcast. The humor that you sprinkle throughout keeps the podcast fresh and light.
All-in-all, a really well-done podcast.
Not the ideal user?
John:
Great podcast! I especially enjoyed your use of the John Hodgman excerpt: it was appropriately creepy and amusing, forcing the listener to reconsider just how much an author might try to glean about his audience. Your ideas were also especially thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Like you, I questioned the uniformity of Johnson’s “user.” The user, in his theory, is “learning, doing, and producing,” not simply consuming (31). His user seems to be the ideal user, the one who wants to be involved in the creation and structure of a technology, and the one willing to take the time to interact with the other stakeholders in that technology. You differentiate between the “audience” of YouTube and the “users” of YouTube to make the point that not all folks engaged with the technology are really full-fledged users of it. I agree: there are some users who are far more engaged in YouTube than others. I envision these users/consumers along a continuum, with the most active on one end and the least active on the other. They are both “users”; it is just that some are more deeply engaged with the content than others.
I would not go so far as to differentiate between “artist” and “audience,” however. Just as Barthes (in “The Death of the Author”) forces us to reconsider meaning making as centered in the reader, so too does YouTube force us to reconsider the relationship between producer and consumer. Each viewing of a YouTube video makes more meaning than the video would sitting in isolation with no audience to engage with it. And of course, no one would bother posting on YouTube at all if no one were viewing their work; it is only in the viewing that the work is “written” or ultimately “created.”
I know, I know: even I think this is kind-of bogus. After all, someone did make the video, and someone else is simply watching it – or, at the very most, posting comments. One is clearly making something that the other is not. In this case, we do have a separate “user” and “audience.” Perhaps my desire to mess up those distinctions stems in part from my own insecurity about the extent to which I am (or, in this case, am not) an engaged “user” of technology, myself. Sure, I posted a podcast for this class. But I don’t post videos on YouTube and I don’t make edits on Wikipedia. I can create and edit movies; I have done so for personal, live audiences. But am I somehow not a responsible “user” in the Johnson-ian sense, one who is worthy of engaging in the process of co-crafting technologies? Part of the hidden premise of Johnson’s argument seems to be his faith in the user as a committed and interested participant in a larger system or process. He assumes that users want to “have a say” and want to be key players. What about those of us who aren’t so sure we are going to contribute something worthwhile to the technology set up for us to “use”?