Audience

Classical Notions of Audience

The earliest Greek construction of communication, most often related to Aristotle's notion of rhetoric, organized explanations around potential audiences that were well understood at the time. Classical categories such as deliberative and forensic assumed respective audiences of a legislative body and a judge in a court. The concept of the audience was the basis for establishing rules on how to approach communication effectively. Greek notions of comedy utilized the matrix of an audience to construct models of how to use comedy.

Contemporary Studies of Audience

More currently, argumentation studies offer a seminal insight to the function of audience in the persuasion process. Stephen Toulmin's (1958) model of argumentation suggests that the audience supplies the critical ingredient in the three elements necessary for the existence of the argument: (1) data, (2) claim, and (3) warrant. According to Toulmin, audiences mentally provide an unstated warrant to complete the reasonable connection between data and claim. Here again the key stature and essence of the audience in the larger process of communication is apparent and central. This reasoning process [Page 71]is integral to calculations of humor. What rational connections are there between evidence and public claims? These warrant connections are scrutinized in the processes of comedy.

Studies of public address identify various types of audience such as the hostile or sympathetic audience. The disposition of an audience shapes the strategic options in constructing messages. Theorists tend to believe that humor is an ideal strategy for addressing hostile audiences because it tends to disarm hostility in the hearer and open the listener to additional points of view.

Technology and Audience

The reliable and stable conceptualization of audience has become more diffuse with the advent of technology. We now recognize the existence of a primary audience—those physically present at the delivery of a message. This presumes a variety of secondary audiences who now see messages disseminated through technologies, such as radio, television, film, and the Internet. We now speak of many messages—especially humorous ones—as “going viral.” Our most advanced and state of the art studies on communication seek to master the peculiar diffusions of the audience that is exceptionally connected by technology in a global information environment. Advanced techniques such as “dial testing” allow politicians to know almost instantly how audiences are responding to messages. Focus group methodologies allow communication experts to discern how humorous messages might be interpreted or misinterpreted before reaching a wider audience. Communication experts can deftly define and categorize various parts of an audience by ideology, age, income, gender, and other discernible factors. The instantaneous nature of audience feedback through mediums such as Twitter have to some extent reversed the classic flow of communication from sender to receiver, creating an audience feedback mechanism that can now be overwhelming to the speaker.

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