rae niebel journal 3

The artifacts I chose were a Bible, an X-Box controller and a diary. I chose these objects because I feel they touch on important aspects of audience. The Bible was an artifact I felt I had to add because it is arguably the best selling book of all time, with the widest range of an audience. There is much to draw about the audience of someone reading a Bible, but one of the major things that we can draw is how different everyone interprets the Bible. This is throughout history as well as throughout demographics in the world. Simply stated, the Bible best portrays how audience is the ultimate interpreter of a work, and they are the ones that get to say what your work says.

The next thing I chose was an X-Box controller, which I chose because it is almost a pun to the idea of audience in technology: technological rhetoric controls today’s society more than I believe any of us realize. This is why people tried to sue Hilary Clinton for swaying the masses on Facebook. The audience that technology accumulates, from everything like a text on a cell phone to Halo 3, has the power to control society today.

The last thing I chose was a diary. One of the concepts I find is most debated in audience is, are you your own audience? I would argue that, yes, you make your work legitimate by being your own audience. You can elicit your own response. With this diary, I am portraying how vast and how minimal our audiences can be, and that all work is important because, by definition, all work has an audience.

In my artifacts, I think that I pulled from different genres, but both the diary and the Bible are commonly on paper. One could easily argue that they can also both be found online though, but because that’s not the point I’m trying to make with these artifacts it should not be addressed.

In Edbauer’s article we can conclude that circulation is not only a necessary constraint of rhetoric but also a vital component. Without circulation, there is no rhetoric. In Wysocki’s article, we can conclude that design of a text can have just as much influence as the text itself, and is therefore equally important if not more important. Through Gladwell’s article, one could claim that just because technology is a defining part of our society today, paper is still a necessity and this fact should not go unnoticed so easily.