Types of Participants in Social Media Audience

Anna Bączkowska, University of Gdansk, Poland
anna.baczkowska@ug.edu.pl

Due to the nature of computer-mediated communication, the participants of online interaction are mostly anonymous, and the audience is collective. Since it is undefined, it is sometimes dubbed the imagined audience, i.e., a conceptualisation of potential interactants. Ede and Lunsford distinguish between invoked audience, which is one imagined by the writer of a message, and addressed audience, which comprises the actual readers of the message. A writer of a message is not always the author of the message. If the author does not want to type and post a message themselves, they can relegate it to a writer. Similarly, on the reception end, the addressee is not necessarily the target of a message. The former is the person one talks/writes to, while the latter is the person at whom the message is actually targeted. The posted message reaches not only the addressee to whom the message is sent, but anyone out there who happens to see the post and decides to read it (i.e., originally unratified participants, but due to the nature of social media which host open access to posted messages, they automatically become ratified participants) or those recipients the producer ratifies him/herself (friends on Facebook, subscribers on YouTube, etc.). Thus, the addressee and the target may, but need not, coincide. The notion of ratified versus unratified addresses, originally proposed by Goffman, is substantially modified in the context of social media, since addressees change their status from overhearers, or unratified participants, to ratified participants who are not addressees/targets. Both ratified and unratified participants on social media can freely express their opinion by posting their message or by adding their opinions to existing posts, whether or not they are the addressees/targets of the message.

Keywords: addressed audience, imagined audience, invoked audience

References:
Ede, L., & Lunsford, A., (1984). Audience addressed/audience invoked: The role of audience in composition theory and pedagogy. College Composition and Communication, 35(2), 155–171. https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc198414879
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. University of Philadelphia Press.
Litt, E., (2012). Knock, knock. Who’s there? The imagined audience. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 56(3), 330–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.705195