I've had incurable stage fright all my life--on and off of a stage. I, like many, have found the internet to be an equalizer between the outgoing and the more reserved. In most cases, I'm more comfortable with an audience online than off. That's not to say that I don't still have those same feelings of nervousness when I add to the information heap. Rather, I can better control the conditions in which I present to an audience. I can decide when and how to present, and the option to edit is usually just a click away. Even other forms of the written word don't provide this luxury.
On the internet, the volume of your voice doesn't matter. And, as we learn from Clive Thompson in his Wired article Thinking Out Loud: How Successful Networks Nurture Good Ideas, the size of the audience doesn't matter much either. If just one audience member is able to make some connection with a contribution, that's 100% more connections made had that contribution not been made. Sometimes all it takes is one connection for a chain reaction to be set in motion. We see this in Thompson's example of Ory Okolloh putting the call out to find a programmer, which led to the development of an application used today in emergencies around the world. Okolloh actively made this connection happen, but many connections occur without instruction. Furthermore, even when audience members only observe, they are still adding to the collective learning environment, as described in chapter four of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. Thomas and Brown mention that the action of simply visiting a website makes an impact, as observers are counted in the page views.
Much of the content on the internet, such as comments, wouldn't be created if not for an audience. Other content will exist with or without an internet audience, but simply knowing there is a potential audience has an effect on how one make their content. Some people--particularly those producing something creative, artistic, or personal--might balk at the thought of this unwanted influence. However, I'm not so sure that it's a bad thing. The potential of an audience that is not immediately present can give a creator/contributor a level of self-awareness that invokes responsibility and consideration for their actions, but (hopefully) not self-consciousness. For some people, audiences can provide the much-needed accountability to stay on task or be productive. Many artists and photographers, for example, participate in "365 projects" where they post one piece of work per day for a year.
It's not just the division between the extroverted and the introverted that is solved by the internet, either. The internet, as a talking or sharing platform, equalizes the rich and the poor; the rural and suburban and the urban; the young and the old. Provided, that is, that they all have access to the internet. This equalizer, unfortunately, is also a divider. Often, many have to find a way across the digital divide before they gain a spot on the internet. Most libraries offer patrons free access to the internet, but in some cases it is a matter of information literacy. The academic librarians' concept of a blended librarian who teaches information literacy in terms of technology may be among the ideas that public librarians can adopt when addressing the digital divide.
Great points. I think the impact of the audience goes beyond just whether there is one or not, but also what means for interaction the audience has. No doubt it feels different to write a (one-way) book compared to a (two-way, public) blog post or (two-way, personal) email.
ReplyDeleteThanks also for sharing the idea of a blended librarian!
Another thing that stood out to me in Clive Thompson's article was his claim that "Before the Internet, most people rarely wrote for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college." Obviously we have a lot of literature and non-fiction that was produced by post-schooling individuals before the Internet, but I think he is saying that these people were in the minority. I wonder if that is true? Writing letters used to be a big part of many people's lives, perhaps *because* something like the Internet (with fast communication) was not available. But rather than presenting email and social media writing volumes as if they exploded out of nowhere, it seems better to consider how much of this is just a shift in medium. And letter-writing has an obvious, explicit audience.