Following in the footsteps of Michel at the P2P Foundation, I'm going to be posting sections of the piece I wrote for the inaugrural issue of Audience 2.0. I'm looking forward to the web-publication's launch, but I wanted to give this article some air after the time of writing in August. So expect, over the next week or so, to see the serialized version, the full version appearing on its own page sometime in the near future.

(The) Audience (2.0):
How Shakira, Dirty Harry, and del.icio.us have come to define interactive identity.

Like many, I am skeptical of internet neologisms. I've always given cyberspace a sidelong glance and blogosphere the hairy eyeball. This is not to say that these words are not important—they most certainly are—but rather to stress that their importance lies, not in the terms themselves, but in the cultural contexts that produce a need for them

We pulled cyberspace from the world of science fiction in order to conceptualize a medium that defied any previous notions of communication. We felt more at home in a space—something we can touch, explore, or “surf”—than in a disembodied interconnected network spewing packets of data in all directions. Blogosphere, in turn, has allowed us to envision a topography and politics for a field of social and textual interaction.

Now I have the opportunity to dissect audience 2.0. This is an internet neologism if there ever was one. Any discussion of audience 2.0 must begin, however, by putting audience under the microscope.

The Value of Audience

Adopted directly from the French, audience came into English around 1374 meaning “the action of hearing,” as in “to give audience”(Oxford English Dictionary). Originally derived from the Latin verb audire, audience implied the effort of paying aural attention. Notice that this first English usage pairs give with audience. Giving requires consent and control by the one committing the action and a relatively passive receiver. When I gave my friend a cupcake on his birthday, he was more or less a non-actor in the process, having only to be present when the interaction became, for him, reception. The one giving owns this process of transference. Back in 1374 then, it was the person using his aural capacities that was in control; he gave his audience. The capacity to hear is a bit like the cupcake: a commodity, an object that has some value to be transferred.

Yet hearing abilities are not entirely like a cupcake. For one, the ability to hear is generally not decreased in the act of giving audience, whereas when I gave my roommate the cupcake, I was one cupcake poorer (fortunately, I saw this coming and had purchased one for myself). In economic terms, audience is non-rival. Secondly, my sweet, frosted gift was a one-way exchange. I received nothing for it except a smile, a thank you, and feelings of friendship. When one gives audience, however, the qualities of the exchange are distinct: aural capacities in exchange for sound. Audience, on a very basic level, implicitly delineates an economic relationship between the one hearing and the one speaking. Value is exchanged in the form of hearing abilities and sound—and it depends on both the speaker and listener to actively participate, while the listener holds the upper hand.

The value of aural capacity was perhaps at a high when the Church of England's Arches Court—an ecclesiastical court—was originally called the Court of Audience. The participant giving audience in this court held disproportionately greater power and control in the transaction than the speaker. Members of the Church come to court so they can be heard by the Dean of Arches. Even in our civil and criminal courts, judges “hear” cases, yet maintain control and power over the encounter. To look at this, again, as an economic exchange, audience holds a far higher value than that of speaking. Another example of this uneven power relationship is the psychotherapist and his patient. Here, the value of audience is valued so far above the value of speaking that the gap must be made up through a cash exchange.

The value of the aural commodity—audience—however, has competed with a slightly later definition over the years. Within this competition, ever-changing power relations are at play; the exchange between speaker and listener shifts its balance from one participant in the exchange to the other. The competing meaning that has become the counter-weight to audience in this continual modulation of power arrived around 1407, and meant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “The persons within hearing; an assembly of listeners, an auditory.” Quite different from the 1347 meaning: a decrease in the value of aural capacity. Instead of the listener “giving” his senses, he is passively “within hearing,” merely able to sense the speaker. The value of giving is greatly diminished under this usage. Here, it is the speaker that disproportionately controls the exchange, so much so that one's audience can be taken without consent—it becomes a non-excludable commodity provided one is physically able to hear a sound. In this relation, the one who was once “giving” audience is now “the” audience, the singular multiple—he is disenfranchised.

In the pre-internet era, the value of audience was tied to the number of participants in the exchange. In situations where audience has a high value, there are few hearers and many speakers (Court of Audience, psychotherapist). Scarcity is the determinant for control and power, just as it is when there are few speakers and many providing aural capacity (the loud concert in the park across the street from me, an ice cream truck). In both cases we see an imbalance between the raw number of participants on either end—few to many.

It's clear then, that the terms audience and the audience are quite different. Words with the suffix -ence denote the raw ability to perform an action; for example sapience (derived from the Latin verb meaning “to know”) implies “knowingness,” the pure ability to retain knowledge—therefore we could read audience as “hearingness.” Hearingness is a commodity; it has value; it is a part of an inherent exchange. The audience differs in modern usage by referring to the mass of disenfranchised participants where one's audience has a very low value.

Audience and the audience: same root, essentially the same word, opposite implications when speaking of interaction.