Unintended audiences

I've been intrigued to read the following article from Christianity Today.

While I might take issue with the writer's assumptions and approach, it did make me think quite a bit about what happens with blogging, and what sort unintended consequences it produces, once an idea has been unleashed into the blogosphere.

In his latest post, Alan Jacobs records a conversation with the excellent Miroslav Volf. It highlights, in passing, something about the nature of 'conversations' on the internet. He notes our inability to change and adapt our language rhetorically, as according to our audience (something we do naturally in conversations and in other written media - cf. persuasive essay, thesis, polemic letter to the editor.) This is because our intended audience, that is, the audience we're writing for, is too big, and too unpredictable. For good or ill, we don't know who's eavesdropping on our conversation. And that ought to have implications, not only for what we say, but how we say it, in our blogs. Here's Alan Jacobs, putting it more eloquently:


... while one might want to speak differently in different rhetorical situations, might strive to adjust one's language to suit different audiences that have different needs, in practice we do not live in a world with "bounded" rhetorical situations. "Everyone is listening," he said, thanks to the World Wide Web, as it is accurately called, which takes what you say to one audience and broadcasts it — as text, audio, video, or all of the above — to pretty much anyone who's interested in finding it.

One of the most fundamental principles of rhetoric has always been decorum, that is, suiting one's language to occasion and audience. Those of us who teach writing typically think it vital to get our students to think in these terms — to see that they must adjust style and diction, evidence and argument, to reach the readers they most want to reach.

Such imperatives will never cease to be important. But it also seems likely that we will have to train students to be aware — and will have to train ourselves to be aware — that much of what we say and write can find audiences we never intended. And the consequences of our words' extended reach will not always be positive ones.