Kate Scott

Digital Recontextualization and Audience Construction: A Cognitive Pragmatic Perspective.

Digital technology has made it quick and easy to communicate with indefinitely large and diverse audiences. This is both an opportunity and a challenge. How do we contextualize and recontextualize knowledge when (a) we do not know who might read our messages or when they might do so, and (b) almost all online information is available to anyone with a digital device and an internet connection?

Effective, persuasive and relevant communication achieves its aims by connecting with the assumptions that the addressees hold. Whereas in offline communication we usually know who our audience is and can tailor a message to them, in digitally mediated contexts, the audience is, at best, “imagined”, and the contexts in which we are communicating are “collapsed”. Disparate and diverse audiences each bring different assumptions to their interpretations making a “one size fits all” approach impossible. If communicators try to connect with everyone who might encounter a message online, they risk watering that message down to the point where it is relevant to nobody.

In this presentation, I discuss what cognitive pragmatics can tell us about (a) how to analyze and conceptualize online audiences and adapt messaging on that basis, (b) how to effectively navigate so-called “context collapse” in digitally mediated communication to reach the intended audience. I propose that the recontextualization of information is fundamentally an act of audience construction. Effectively “imagining” an audience is not a case of predicting or guessing who might see a particular post, but rather of recontextualizing the material so that the targeted individuals recognize themselves as addressees and thus process the content with an expectation of relevance. To “imagine” an audience involves identifying those individuals whose cognitive environments one wants to modify and constructing hypotheses about the assumptions they hold. By “imagining” an audience in this way, communicators can adapt their messaging to align with the assumptions of their target audience and simultaneously construct that audience via the process of recontextualization. This perspective has implications for how we analyze, teach, and evaluate expert communication in digital environments. I draw on examples including social media posts, online headlines, and memes to illustrate how recontextualization of information drives audience construction in digital contexts.