Goodbye audiences, hello interlocutors

Audience: implies one-way, controlled communication

In western culture of the last 50 years, what kinds of things have had audiences? Concerts, plays, films...

In these traditional media:

• A member of the "audience" is typically a relatively passive recipient of something that's delivered at them.
• Different parts of the content are usually encountered in a defined sequence that is controlled by the deliverer, not the audience member

• Audience members typically have no chance to modify what's gets delivered at them (other than to skip or sleep through bits of it)
• Hence, everyone encounters more-or-less the same thing

But the web of today is very different from traditional media

In 2008, someone using the web can:

• Choose what to view and what to ignore, and view chunks of content in whatever order suits them (e.g. think hyperlinks and banner blindness)
• See content outside its original context (e.g. RSS feeds let people see content outside of the originating sites)

• Modify what they encounter on your site, and what other people will subsequently encounter, in all kinds of ways, including (but not limited to):
• Changing the format (e.g., by using a different stylesheet or no stylesheet at all)
• Blocking certain kinds of content (e.g. Javascript, or pop-ups, or images)
• Making the content easier for themselves and others to find (e.g. by tagging it, posting it to social networking sites)
• Creating peripheral content that is encountered by other users (e.g. comments, ratings, reviews)
• Changing the content itself -- this is the essence of wikis
• Easily see (and affect) what is being said about you / your site / your products elsewhere

So, do we really have "audiences" for "websites"?

Maybe we did once, back in the "website as electronic brochure" days of 1995.

But is "audience" a term that makes sense today? I'd argue that it isn't for many kinds of site.

Audiences are dead. Long live interlocutors!

So we need a new shorthand term for "people who are using our web-based stuff in all sorts of contexts (not all of which are under our control), and who may expect to be able to contribute in some way". 

The best term I've come up with so far is "interlocutor" -- as in someone with whom you have a conversation. We can have:

• Intended interlocutors: the people we are aiming our site at
• Unintended interlocutors: people we didn't intend to attract, but who are nevertheless using the site
• Positive interlocutors: people who are important or meaningful in some way
• Neutral interlocutors: people who don't have any effect on us
• Negative interlocutors: people whose interactions with us have some kind of detrimental effect

And so on.

The key point is that these are people who are not necessarily expecting to interact with us in a passive, soak-it-up kind of way (although some may well be).

Increasingly, the people using our sites are expecting to have opportunities to:

• Point out deficiencies or good points, and have their views acknowledged
• Enter into dialogue
• Be treated as an individual where relevant (and have their privacy protected)

They are the web users of today: creative, non-deferential, busy individuals. We treat them as "audiences" at our peril.