Wikipedia, “the People Formerly
Known as the Audience,”
and First-Year Writing
> Michael Kuhne and Gill Creel
Writing in and about Wikipedia encourages students to think about the outcomes of
their writing and, by extension, changes the student/teacher relationship in pedagogically
useful ways.
I
n 2006, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen’s blog post “The
People Formerly Known as the Audience” went viral in the journalism community.
In the post Rosen argues that a fundamental power shift has occurred between “Big
Media” and “the people formerly known as the audience” (PFKATA), who were
not only writing back, but also writing on their own and broadcasting voice and
video as well. Yes, the strategic centers of corporate media power still exist, but,
Rosen argues, the rise of the read/write web (a more descriptive phrase for Web
2.0) means Big Media’s understanding of their audience has to change accordingly.
Rosen has personal experience with the read/write web and large media
projects: among his other accomplishments, he is a former member of the advisory
board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia. This
connection between Rosen’s brief manifesto and his service to Wikipedia is not
accidental; quite the contrary, it makes perfect sense because Wikipedia is one of
the most well-known sites where the PFKATA write back. Rosen’s admonition
captures the game-changing shift in audience due to the read/write web. Audience having been such a dilemma for composition studies, it is a short hop from
acknowledging the beauty of Rosen’s recognition of the PFKATA to the reification of it in Wikipedia to launching writing students into the maelstrom that is
Wikipedia editing.
Using the highly collaborative and contested environment of Wikipedia as
a writing platform allows a more concrete understanding of the new digitally embodied audience than traditional classroom writing (including writing to “bots”—
software programs that write back). Writing in and about Wikipedia encourages
students to think about the outcomes of their writing and, by extension, changes
the student/teacher relationship in pedagogically useful ways. Ultimately this article is about giving some examples of this environment and suggesting why it is
pedagogically important, robots and all.
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Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
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“Consider Your Audience” Is Changing
Rosen’s posting is often cited in media studies, and it should also have a profound
influence in composition studies. Rosen’s blog post dramatically calls into question the transforming nature of audience in the twenty-first century. In the read/
write web, the spatial and temporal encounters between writers and their readers
frequently converge. Rosen writes, “The people formerly known as the audience
are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable.”
As writing instructors, we search for environments in which our students
can write to a “realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable” audience. We have
taught too many traditional writing assignments in which the audience is the instructor (and possibly the writer’s peers) or where the audience is imaginary and
artificially constructed (and, yes, we recognize Walter Ong’s admonition that the
audience is always fictional, but in terms of degrees, these artificial audiences are
really, really fictional); at least in the former situation, the writers “know” the audience. In the latter circumstance, however, this rhetorical situation produces writing
that is six degrees removed from a pulse, which makes sense because the imaginary
audience is literally lifeless.
Though we had started our first stumbling effort into Wikipedia before
reading it, now we would like to blame Robert E. Cummings’s Lazy Virtues:Teaching
Writing in the Age of Wikipedia for our current writing pedagogy. One aspect that
Cummings highlights is the notion of authenticity, especially in regard to audience.1
Cummings notes one of the primary challenges of composition classrooms: “Most
assignments ask writers to imagine an audience—and then to compose for their
composition instructor as a surrogate for that idealized, fictional audience” (5). May
the gods forgive us, we’ve done this, but the first step to recovery is admitting we
had a problem, and, yes, we do have a problem. However, we are constantly seeking
alternatives to this moribund dynamic. In more dire moments, we ask ourselves who
would read the student writing that we assign: sadly and too frequently, the only
people who would read this student writing are we, the teachers. Enter Wikipedia,
which “allow[s] students to write for an authentic audience beyond the classroom”
and where “these audiences often write back” (Cummings 5).This interaction echoes
Rosen: the audience is no longer static and imaginable but dynamic and real. We
no longer need to play at the “audience evoked” (Ede and Lunsford); we happen
to have, like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, Marshall McLuhan right here. We do not
have to keep the audience stranded at the classroom door anymore.
A growing and important body of composition scholarship focuses on how
Wikipedia invites its audience into the social construction of knowledge and the
benefits of this for student writing and thinking about writing. Paula Patch, writing in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, highlights Wikipedia’s advantages as a
teaching tool when addressing research. In one part of her course, Patch “provides
direct instruction in navigating and evaluating Wikipedia articles, a strategy that can
then be adapted to responsibly navigating, evaluating, and selecting evidence from all
media, online and print” (279). She is confident that by the end of the course unit,
the experience “makes students smarter consumers of online information and more
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responsible researchers” (281). Meghan Sweeney, also writing in Teaching English
in the Two-Year College, expands Wikipedia as a teaching tool so that students are
actively contributing to Wikipedia articles. Sweeney suggests that “[b]y contributing to Wikipedia, students switch from consumers to producers and subsequently
change their relationship with Wikipedia” and, by extension, with composing overall
(256). Instructors can use Wikipedia in a number of ways. Students can write about
Wikipedia, but as Sweeney shows, students can also write in Wikipedia.This is also
the approach that we advocate. James P. Purdy in his article “When the Tenets of
Composition Go Public: A Study of Writing in Wikipedia” analyzes what happens
when students write in Wikipedia:
When students become contributors to this space, they can come to see themselves as composers who create meaning through writing rather than only as
novices who are cowed and intimidated by the sources of experts. This shift in
perspective is an important step in students’ learning to engage in conversation
with their sources, a skill we often try to teach in our composition courses. (366)
Having students working to improve Wikipedia articles is a critical aspect of this
work. When students initially enter the Wikipedia world, they are frequently
“cowed,” and if their first edits are reverted, they can feel “intimidated by the sources
of experts.” However, if they persist (and encouraging that persistence must be a part
of the instructor’s role), they will begin to make the shift Purdy describes. Besides,
it is not as if the students are dissuaded from working in Wikipedia.Wikipedia itself
admonishes us:
“Just do it!” The Wikipedia community encourages users to be bold when
updating the encyclopedia. . . . We would like everyone to be bold and help
make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia. . . . Wikipedia not only allows you to add,
revise, and edit articles: it wants you to do it. (“Wikipedia:Be bold”; emphasis in
the original)
Patch, Sweeney, and Purdy all recognize that Wikipedia is practically begging users
to join in the social construction of knowledge, to build, to respond, to use writing
to do something in the world—the whole world, not just the classroom—and Wikipedia’s approach to audience is one of the main catalysts for this collaborative action.
The shift that we ask students to make from knowledge consumers to
knowledge co-creators is seismic.The read/write environment within the Wikipedia
community is an antidote to static and artificial writing students frequently do in
classrooms.The desire for an alternative writing environment is certainly an ancient
one, but more recently it has been a lament within composition and rhetoric studies
for almost thirty years. James A. Reither, writing in a 1985 issue of College English,
bemoans the state of much academic writing when he asserts that writing instructors
“need to find ways to immerse writing students in academic knowledge/discourse
communities so they can write from within those communities” (624).Ten years after
Reither, Joseph Petraglia, in his article in the Journal of Advanced Composition, coins
the expression “pseudo-transactional writing,” which is writing “solely intended to
meet teacher expectations rather than engage in a transference of information for
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the purposes of informing the uninformed or demonstrating mastery over context.”
Wikipedia provides the discourse community Reither seeks, while also providing
the escape from Petraglia’s “pseudo-transactional writing” that we have been—and,
sadly, still are—assigning students. In place of the pseudo-transactional, we strive
for what Petraglia, riffing on the work of James Britton, describes as “transactional
writing,” which “does not pretend to function in any way other than it does; in
this sense, its rhetorical aims are transparent, its purported audience and purposes
are authentic.” Put in the language of our students, “transactional writing” is the
writing that occurs in the “real world,” which in their eyes always exists outside
of academia, thus indirectly condemning academia and much of academic writing as “unreal.” To our students Wikipedia clearly is not academic. Writing in an
environment that demands high-level collaboration and critical thinking, where a
student’s contributions can be viewed by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands,
is an effective dose of reality, both for our students and for us.
Ultimately, writing in Wikipedia is different because the audience not only
is real but frequently responds, as Cummings notes. James E. Porter’s exploration of
the relationship of audience to discourse community in Audience and Rhetoric: An
Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community, published in 1992, some ten
years prior to the creation of Wikipedia, seems positively prescient. Porter argues,
“The division between writer and reader breaks down in the discourse community;
from the social perspective the discourse community is at once the producer and
consumer of its own discourse” (84). Using Rosen’s logic, Porter’s analysis extends to
the PFKATA in Wikipedia, who will consider writing and responding according to
the rules of the Wikipedia discourse community. For students working in Wikipedia,
they experience the permeability of the writer/reader division firsthand: where
they were once readers and consumers of Wikipedia articles, they find themselves
also writing and producing Wikipedia articles.
The movement of Porter’s discourse community into the online environment
as Rosen’s PFKATA changes the audience game in the composition classroom. In
1992, Porter noted that the common command of the writing teacher to “‘Consider
your audience’” was “not a simple task” (3, 6). It is still not simple, but the good
news is the discourse community is telling us its expectations, both specific and
general, on pages like “Wikipedia:Manual of Style” and “Wikipedia:Five Pillars.”
It is making itself more tangible and immediate. When a writer attempts to meet
these criteria through a contribution to the community, the community will write
back, often with lightning speed. What could only be theorized and amorphous
in the past is made immediately present here. That offers the possibility of making
the learning more present as well.
Our Course: Launching Pad to the Wikiverse
As is the case for most two-year college instructors, the bulk of our teaching load
consists of first-year composition courses (both developmental and college level).The
second-semester freshman English class described here focuses on research writing.
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It begins with a review of current popular literature about Wikipedia. As of this
writing, this includes articles such as Tushar Rae’s “Wikipedia’s Editing Process Is
Still a Mystery to Students” from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus
blog; Clay Shirky’s “Wikipedia—An Unplanned Miracle” from the Guardian; and
Jon Brodkin’s “The 10 Biggest Hoaxes in Wikipedia’s First 10 Years” in PCWorld.
The first writing assignment is an analysis of one of the debates about Wikipedia
raised in the literature review articles. With the students having dipped their toes
in the broader cultural debates around Wikipedia, the second major assignment
introduces them to the specific criteria for crafting a Wikipedia article and asks
them to analyze one article and explain how it could be improved to meet these
criteria. Informed by these macro- and micro-level analyses of Wikipedia, students
in the next assignment work in groups to edit a Wikipedia article and document
this process in a separate collaborative document. Students work extensively in
Wikipedia during this assignment and often interact with other Wikipedians as the
students try to work to the criteria established by the Wikipedia discourse community. (This is where the fireworks happen that inspired this article and that we will
detail shortly.) The final major writing assignment of the semester asks students to
reflect on their readings, writings, and experience during the semester and analyze
anew some aspect of Wikipedia or the debates around it in light of the knowledge
they have gained. As their instructors are doing now, students often comment on
Wikipedia’s assertive audience in these final analyses and reflections.2
Open the Pod Bay Door . . .
So, what does this audience look like? Robots.Yes, to twist Obi-wan’s words,“These
are the droids you’re looking for.”Wikipedia is crawling with robots, known as bots.
These “are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. . . . that
are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be
possible for a human alone,” and they are our friends (“Internet bot”). Like HAL
9000 and Skynet, these bots talk back, but unlike their sci-fi counterparts, they do
not try to kill the interlocutor.
Let’s start with a simple example: SineBot. SineBot signs users’ names on
Talk pages when users forget to do this themselves (“User:SineBot”).Talk pages in
Wikipedia are pages where editors discuss edits they are making or plan to make to
a Wikipedia article in order to try to reach consensus. An automated message from
SineBot explains that having Talk page comments signed “is useful because other
editors will be able to tell who said what, and when they said it.Thank you”—and
such a polite bot (SineBot). Thus, SineBot is tasked with making collaborative
knowledge making easier: if I know who you are, it is easier to make knowledge
with you. From an audience standpoint, SineBot is an immediate, embodied audience member telling the writer, “Hey, you forgot something.”The writer does not
have to consider SineBot’s reaction; in fact, it is the very act of forgetting SineBot’s
reaction that brings it to the rescue. As journalist and blogger Tim Porter writes in
response to Rosen’s diatribe,“The publisher-audience relationship remains, but today
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it is a loop, not a pipe.” This is the new, feedback loop with a touch of automation
thrown in, the Bots Now Known as the Audience (BNKATA).
However, SineBot is a fairly simple version of the BNKATA. Our favorite
bot on Wikipedia is the one that has struck student editors most often in our experience, and it strikes because it has been programmed not to trust them.Yes, there
is a bot programmed to determine the writer’s level of ethos. XlinkBot does what
its name suggests: it deletes links to other URLs from Wikipedia pages. However,
it doesn’t just delete any link from any editors. It focuses on links that are “frequently misused by new and anonymous users” (“User:XLinkBot”). XLinkBot is
programmed to judge whether an edit can be trusted based on two variables: the
experience of the editor and the usefulness of the source URL across the experience of previous editors and in conjunction with Wikipedia policies, especially
those related to copyright in this case.
For example, editor Lyn3636, a student in one of our sections, added a link
to the official YouTube video for the song “The Nobodies” by Marilyn Manson
to the article “The Nobodies (song)” on March 6, 2011 (“Revision History of
The Nobodies (song)”). One minute later, XLinkBot deleted the full edit because “[m]any YouTube videos of newscasts, shows or other content of interest to
Wikipedia visitors are copyright violations and should not be linked to,” although
“[t]here is no blanket ban on linking to YouTube or other user-submitted video
sites” (“Wikipedia:External links”; emphasis in the original). This proviso is important because it shows that XLinkBot is programmed to make a trust decision
whether to allow the link or not, and the history of this particular link proves
that. Since this link was to the official video, XLinkBot guessed wrong, as the
page “Wikipedia:WikiProject Songs” explains one can link to “videos that have
been uploaded by the musician(s), the record companies, or Vevo.” This video is
on Vevo. However, the wrong guess by XLinkBot was based on the fact that this
was Lyn3636’s second-ever edit on Wikipedia, and it was a link to YouTube. Odds
were on XLinkBot’s side. When editor PerfesserC reinstated the deleted link two
weeks later (said user having an awe-inspiring seventeen edits at the time) with
a brief explanation, the link stayed (“Revision history of The Nobodies (song)”).
As of this writing, the edit remains. PerfesserC could be trusted; Lyn3636 could
not.3 In this moment, Lyn3636 learns in an immediate and practical way what the
discourse community values and even how to manipulate the audience to get the
desired outcome, even when the audience is a software program.
But wait, there’s more! Interestingly, XLinkBot does not just extract the
URL from the offending edit; it deletes everything added with the link. While
designed as the most efficient way to delete links and not leave articles a complete
mess (see discussion at “User:XLinkBot/FAQ”), this mechanism also has the effect
of getting an editor’s attention. On April 8, 2010, editor Tameika05 was working
in the article “Abortion in Panama” (“Revision history of Abortion in Panama”).
Over the course of six hours,Tameika05 added over a thousand words to the article,
restructured it, and added a list of references. Unfortunately, at the end of this process, Tameika05 also added a link to a page in the website About.com. In less than
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a minute XLinkBot removed all of the six hours’ work. In an email, Tameika05,
also known as Tameika Williams, explains her response to these events:
I am so frustrated and confused, [a classmate] and I were working on our article
Abortion in Panama[;] we’d changed the structure and added additional information. Then I get a message [from XLinkBot] and our whole entire progress that
we made so far was deleted . . . . I was citing the sources we used and it was general information that was not biased. I am frustrated and do not know what to
do. Or even what was done wrong. The only thing I had NOT done was fill out
the edit summary each time. Please help me because I am now lost. (Williams)
XLinkBot has just handed Williams and her instructor an excellent learning moment,
and despite her frustration,Williams is already problem-solving and analyzing in this
email. She is listing the things she knows she did correctly: citing information, using
neutral point of view and unbiased information.This makes a writing teacher’s heart
proud. She then admits to one expectation of the discourse community in which
she failed—writing the edit summaries—searching for the trigger for the bot attack.
Finally, she reaches out to the instructor for help. In this situation the instructor gets
to play the role of adviser rather than evaluator because the evaluation has already
been done. A very different kind of conversation can now take place between the
student-as-editor and the instructor than would have taken place had the instructor
done the evaluation. As teacher Carra Leah Hood writes in her own article about
teaching with Wikipedia, “reading and editing activities [in Wikipedia] require
reflection on both the content of an entry and the effectiveness of the writing to
convey that content.” That is exactly what Williams is doing in this email (a piece
of transactional writing itself) because “Wikipedia delivers pedagogy, a pedagogy
familiar to writers and to teachers of writing” (Hood). In this case, that pedagogy
was delivered by the BNKATA.
Ground Control to Major Tom
Not all exchanges on Wikipedia possess that disconcerting Bladerunner vibe; actual
human beings devote their time, talents, and skills to improving Wikipedia articles,
using what Clay Shirky describes as their “cognitive surplus.”As a novice Wikipedia
editor, student Jeremiah Cunningham began the semester uninspired and antagonistic toward working in Wikipedia. Writing in his end-of-the-semester reflective
analytical essay, Cunningham notes, “From the outside looking in, Wikipedia’s approach to sharing information seemed unpredictable at best.” However, over the
course of the semester, as he goes deep “into the heart of Wikipedia,” Cunningham’s
perspective shifts: “when stepping into [Wikipedia’s] world of editing and sharing,
a very different picture emerges where information that is shared is not only reliable but also admirable.”
Cunningham’s experiences in Wikipedia highlight the tightly threaded
relationship between knowledge making and audience. He writes about an experience he had early in the semester. He was attempting to edit the article “Further
In,” which is about an album created by the folk musician Greg Brown.The further
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into the editing process Cunningham goes, the more he learns from the Wikipedia
discourse community. When Cunningham’s class collaborator adds biographical
information about Greg Brown to the album article, it is immediately removed,
but the editor Airproofing takes the time in the article’s talk page to write: “The
biography information that is being put on this page does not belong here. This is
an album page. It is more appropriate for that information to go on Brown’s own
biography page” (Airproofing). Cunningham notes, “[Airproofing’s] reasoning for
completely editing out the information we had added made good sense as tough
as it was to swallow.” While still working on “Further In,” an edit made by Cunningham is removed, again with an explanation by a Wikipedian named Iknow23.
Cunningham acknowledges that “the reasoning behind the edits [made by Iknow23]
provided more of a learning experience for me the novice editor and viewer [than] the
experience of making our own addition to the article did” (Cunningham; our
emphasis). This is astonishing learning, one in which the collaborative knowledge
making within the discourse asks the student to move quickly between the roles of
writer, reader, knowledge consumer, and knowledge producer. Cunningham isn’t
thinking abstractly about who his audience is; instead, he is acting and reacting
in a collaborative knowledge-making effort with interested and more established
Wikipedians. He is learning how to write and think in very specific, concrete ways.
Cunningham had one more editing exchange, this one a bit harsh by his
own estimation. As “the novice Wikipedian,” Cunningham “could not find the talk
page in the beginning for the ‘Further In’ article that was right in front of my very
eyes,” so instead he created a “talk” page as part of the “WikiProject Albums” page.
For the uninitiated, the “WikiProject Albums” page consists of “an organization
of Wikipedians dedicated to improving Wikipedia’s coverage of all kinds of musical albums” (“Wikipedia: WikiProject Albums”). These folks are committed and
knowledgeable. Imagine walking into a party where everyone is clearly smarter than
you are, and you can begin to imagine Cunningham’s context. For Cunningham to
move his “Further In” talk page to the WikiProject Albums page was an egregious
affront, and editor IllaZilla had no problem indicating the essential wrongness of
this action. IllaZilla “took me behind the proverbial Wikipedia woodshed,” while
also asking “important questions of our project and point[ing] it in the right direction.”This is a remarkable exchange for Cunningham, one that opens his eyes to the
Wikipedia discourse community. He and IllaZilla “had several more talks back and
fourth about this dilemma. Not all of them were civil but all of them were respectful
and all of them from my standpoint were very productive.” Cunningham even took
the time to explore IllaZilla’s Wikipedia profile page, where he found that IllaZilla
was “an editor who had advanced many articles in Wikipedia through its grading
scale and some to the point of being a featured article” (“User: IllaZilla”). Because
Cunningham spent time exploring the backchannels of knowledge making within
Wikipedia—an article’s revision history, an article’s talk page, a Wikipedian’s profile
page—he appreciated “how well the system worked. I also came to the realization
of how admirable it was that so many would take the time and energy to advance
the education and learning of others worldwide and never receive any credit or
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praise for it” (Cunningham). Cunningham’s willingness to engage and explore leads
to some high-level, high-touch learning wherein his instructors are the PFKATA.
However, because we are his official instructors, our relationship with Cunningham
is weighted with the conventions of schooling—grading, authority roles, ingrained
notions of accountability—and these can, in fact, hamper learning. Outside the
frame of schooling, the PFKATA avoid these pitfalls. No matter how hard we could
have tried, there is nothing in a pseudo-transactional writing assignment that we
could have designed that would come close to the kind of feedback and learning
Cunningham experienced through our assignments but outside the classroom.
Lest Cunningham’s learning appear too general in its focus on higher-order
thinking and discourse communities, the PFKATA can deal with specific style and
grammar concerns as well. On April 6, 2011, user Walklee3 added a small edit to
the article “Brothers (The Black Keys album)” (“Revision history of Brothers”).
Later that same day, editor F6119474 copyedited some of these additions to adhere
to Wikipedia’s neutral point-of-view policy, which is important enough to the
community to be one of the “Five Pillars of Wikipedia” (“Wikipedia:Five pillars”).
In this case, that edit changed the sentence “The album debuted at an incredible
#3 spot on the Billboard 200” removing “an incredible” and “spot.” The word
“prominent” was removed from another sentence. These minor changes represent,
of course, a huge shift in the presentation of the material. F6119474 explained in
the edit summary “This addition was biased.” Not to be deterred,Walklee3 re-added
the same words to the article within the hour. Thus, the PFKATA can be ignored
just as instructors so often are, but this is not the end of the story. The next day,
the discourse community returned to the article in the form of editor Ffirehorse.
Ffirehorse again removed “an incredible” and “spot” and took the opportunity to
get even more granular by following up with a grammar edit, correctly moving the
apostrophe in “groups’” to “group’s.” On April 17, editor Red Dwarf took care of
“prominent,” just to be clear that it did not escape unscathed (“Revision history
of Brothers”). Clearly, the PFKATA loop can provide valuable feedback at multiple
levels as “[e]valuation of writing occurs immediately and as an ongoing activity
throughout the process of text construction” in Wikipedia (Hood).
For these to changes to be useful, of course, the students must reflect on
them.That reflection occurs in face-to-face conversations with students as they try
to strategize ways to satisfy Wikipedia editors like Ffirehorse. It occurs in moments
like Williams’s email as students write their way through negotiating the expectations of other Wikipedia editors on the fly. It also occurs in the more intentional,
reflective writing of the final essay, like Cunningham’s ruminations above.
All of these furtive forays around, about, and into Wikipedia speak to students’ growing awareness of themselves as communicators in a relationship with
readers, who in turn are themselves communicating. James Porter crystalizes this
relationship when he writes:
The first goal of the writer is ‘socialization’ into the community, which requires
an understanding of the community’s unstated assumptions as well as its explicit
conventions and intertextuality. The writer has to become a full-fledged memW i k i p e d i a , “ t h e Pe o p l e F o r m e r ly K n ow n a s t h e A u d i e n c e ”
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ber in order to achieve identification within a community. Audience analysis is
not merely collecting facts about the audience [. . .]. Rather the writer’s job is to
understand the community and adopt an appropriate ethos within it. (J. E. Porter
112)
When writing in Wikipedia works, these rhetorical maneuvers, tactics, and strategies
are precisely what is happening. As writing instructors, we continually refine our
pedagogy and curriculum in search of the elusive moment when our students can
experience what is at stake when writers write. In the twenty-first century, readers
read and frequently respond. Sometimes gently, sometimes harshly, student writers
in Wikipedia learn the discursive rules, either as foregrounded in instruction (Patch;
Sweeney) or as taught to them by other Wikipedians.
Conclusion:The Right Stuff
We came to Jay Rosen’s PFKATA way of thinking, and much of our enthusiasm
for exploring the possibilities of writing in digital environments, via Clay Shirky’s
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations and Cognitive
Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky’s writings push one to
imagine composition classrooms untethered from the 8½- x 11-inch sheet of paper.
In Cognitive Surplus, Shirky writes:
Old logic, television logic, treated audiences as little more than collections of
individuals. Their members didn’t create any real value for one another. The logic
of digital media, on the other hand, allows the people formerly known as the
audience to create value for one another every day. (42)
By extension, this assertion recognizes Wikipedia’s potential for rich exchanges between students writing in Wikipedia and the PFKATA or BNKATA responding: the
outcome of the exchange is “value for one another every day.”The point of sharing
these stories is to reveal that value and the richness of the writing environment that
Wikipedia offers and its intersection with progressive and technologically adept
composition pedagogy.This isn’t just a cool toy; it’s a serious learning environment
not available in traditional writing classrooms.
At the level of practice, we also just wanted to provide snapshots of what
teachers and students can expect in this world and at least in part to provide a
warning. What we have here are robots and people, cranky and helpful, doing our
jobs for us. That can seem a little odd, but also wonderful. Teaching writing has
always been impossible to do alone anyway, especially when it comes to questions
of audience.That’s why so much ink has been spilled over this concept in particular.
As recently as June 2011, College Composition and Communication, in an episode of
its constructive poster series, tackled a definition of audience once again and ran
into this new reality:
Increasingly, students—like all composers—are also composing for public and distant audiences via the Web. These audiences can be particularly difficult to write
for given that we can’t always know in advance who they are. At the same time,
these audiences can be very helpful when, for example, they respond [. . .]
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to drafts, showing the composers how a given text is being interpreted by a
reader. (753)
We recognize as a discipline that the audience has been made more real here at the
end of the Gutenberg parenthesis, but if our department is any indication, many
writing instructors continue asking students to write to invoked audiences (and
we readily implicate ourselves). We can still encourage students to think about, or
imagine, an audience. Undoubtedly, that can be a useful exercise for any writing—
we are trying to imagine you right now—as far as it goes.
However, as our examples show, now when writers want to share their
work, the imagining can stop because in less than a minute the Wikipedians may
be here. They’ll let the writer know exactly who the audience is and what is going to change, and we don’t have to imagine the writer or the audience anymore
because the world where we are all the people formerly known as the audience
is here. We’ve seen it, and things can get rough in here. Be prepared. We hope that
helps. <
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Jeff Sommers, the three TETYC reviewers,
colleague Dominic Saucedo, and Amanda Roll-Kuhne for their insightful and
constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
1. We understand the difficulty of the term authenticity in high theory discussions of epistemology. However, it serves a purpose for this argument. The authentic audience is the being that actually reads one’s writing and responds to it.
2. Course materials are publicly displayed and available at <http:engl1111
.pbworks.com>. See Creel, Kuhne, and Saucedo for full citation information.
3. PerfesserC is one of the coauthors of this article.
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