Audiences,relevance, and cognitive environments

This paper discusses the fundamental sense in which the components of an argument should be relevant to the intended audience. In particular, the evidence advanced should be relevant to the facts and assumptions that are manifest in the cognitive environment of the audience. A version of Sperber and Wilson's concept of the cognitive environment is applied to argumentative concerns, and from this certain features of audience-relevance are explored: that the relevance of a premise can vary with the audience; that irrelevant premises can be made relevant; that evidence can be relevant by degrees; and that this notion of relevance will assist the argumentation analyst in the identification and assessment of hidden premises.     

Re-conceptualizing Museum Audiences: Power,Activity, Responsibility

ABSTRACT

This article offers a theoretical overview of how diverse disciplines, such as cultural studies, sociology, philosophy of art, education, and marketing, have contributed to the evolving conceptualization of museum audiences over the past 50 years. Audience research has moved through different paradigms. Every shift in the way audiences are viewed unavoidably influences the way museum professionals view themselves, their role, and the way they interact with their audiences. The most recent audience conceptualization envisions visitors as active interpreters who selectively construct meaning based on their personal experiences, associations, biases, and sense of identity, whereas the museum is envisioned as an open work that is only completed by the visitor. However, certain challenges loom over this new audience conceptualization. It is argued that such visualization underestimates power issues while romanticizing the power of audience activity, thereby ignoring issues of responsibility.     

Stereotyping Effect of Black Women's Sexual Rap on White Audiences

White female and male students were exposed to a set of videos featuring popular music performed by female Black artists. The videos presented either songs of devoted love or rap designed to be sexually titillating. Purportedly, in an unrelated person-perception test, the students then evaluated a series of White and Black women presented in portrait format on slides. A control group performed the person-perception test without prior exposure to music videos. Significant effects of music exposure on the evaluation of Black women, but not on White women, were obtained. Specifically, exposure to rap laden with sexual imagery fostered distinctly unfavorable evaluations of Black women. Following exposure to sexual rap, as compared with exposure to popular romantic music or to no music exposure, the assessment of these women's personality resulted in a general downgrading of positive traits and a general upgrading of negative ones.     

Multiple Audiences as Text Stakeholders: A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing Complex Rhetorical Situations

In public communication contexts, such as when a company announces the proposal for an important organizational change, argumentation typically involves multiple audiences, rather than a single and homogenous group, let alone an individual interlocutor. In such cases, an exhaustive and precise characterization of the audience structure is crucial both for the arguer, who needs to design an effective argumentative strategy, and for the external analyst, who aims at reconstructing such a strategic discourse. While the peculiar relevance of multiple audience is often emphasized in the argumentation literature and in rhetorical studies, proposals for modelling multi-audience argumentative situations remain scarce and unsystematic. To address this gap, we propose an analytical framework which integrates three conceptual constructs: (1) Rigotti and Rocci’s notion of communicative activity type, understood as the implementation of an interaction scheme into a piece of institutional reality, named interaction field; (2) the stakeholder concept, originally developed in strategic management and public relations studies to refer to any actor who affects and/or is affected by the organizational actions and who, accordingly, carries an interest in them; (3) the concept of participant role as it emerges from Goffman’s theory of conversation analysis and related linguistic and media studies. From this integration, we derive the notion of text stakeholder for referring to any organizational actor whose interest (stake) becomes an argumentative issue which the organizational text must account for in order to effectively achieve its communicative aim. The text stakeholder notion enables a more comprehensive reconstruction and characterization of multiple audience by eliciting the relevant participants staged in a text and identifying, for each of them, the interactional role they have, the peculiar interest they bear and the related argumentative issue they create. Considering as an illustrative case the defense document issued by a corporation against a hostile takeover attempt made by another corporation, we show how this framework can support the analysis of strategic maneuvering by better defining the audience demand and, so, better explaining how real arguers design and adapt their topical and presentational choices.     

Targeted Audiences in Anti-Drug Ads: Message Cues,Perceived Exposure,Perceived Effects,and Support for Funding

Perceived exposure has been offered as the main factor in how people estimate the effects of media messages on others, but a recent study found this did not hold for two prosocial messages. This study (N = 160) shows that demographic cues in anti-drug messages may communicate who the intended targets are, thus influencing perceived exposure and perceived effects for different age, gender, and racial groups. In turn, perceived effects on the self and others predict support for funding anti-drug campaigns. The possible impact of perceived similarity between a group and the “implied audience” on perceived effects is discussed.     

Culturally Sensitive AIDS Educational Videos for African American Audiences: Effects of Source, Message, Receiver, and Context

The importance of using culturally sensitive educational materials in HIV-related interventions with racial and ethnic minority groups is widely recognized. However, little empirical research has been conducted to assess the relative effectiveness of different techniques for creating culturally sensitive AIDS educational videos. Two field experiments with three samples of African American adults (N = 174, 173, and 143) were conducted to assess how source characteristics (race of communicator), message characteristics (multicultural message vs. culturally specific message), and audience characteristics (racial distrust and AIDS-related distrust) influence proximate (perceptions of the message's credibility and attractiveness) and distal (AIDS-related attitudes, beliefs, and behavioral intentions) output variables for AIDS educational videos. In Study 1, an AIDS video with a culturally specific message was rated as more credible, more attractive, and of higher quality than was a video with a multicultural message. The multicultural message was rated less favorably when delivered by a White announcer than when the announcer was Black. In Study 2, the same pattern was replicated with a second community sample and a campus-based sample. Study 2 also indicated that a multicultural message might be more effective if delivered in a culturally specific context, namely, after audience members watch a culturally specific video. Minimal changes were observed in distal outcome variables. It is argued that influencing proximate output variables is necessary, though not sufficient, for effecting long-term change in AIDS-related attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.