“Embracing Digital Literacies: A Study of First-Year Students’ Digital Compositions”
by Bay VanWagenen | Xchanges 10.2/11.1
Managing an Audience
Students not only had ideas about who their audiences were, but also had strategies for managing audience expectations. Several participants described careful choices about what to share, when to share it, and how to craft their voice to achieve the desired effect on their audience. Jake, who maintains a Tumblr blog focused on social justice issues, was particularly thoughtful about how he engages his audience. He explained that when writing about sensitive or controversial topics, he aims to present multiple perspectives before arriving at his own conclusion. This approach, he noted, helps him “not come across as too preachy” — a concern that reflects his awareness of how his audience might respond to one-sided arguments.
Another participant, Rosa, described how she uses Instagram hashtags strategically to manage who can find and engage with her content. Rather than using the most popular hashtags, which might attract a broader but less targeted audience, she selects hashtags specific to her interest communities. “If I put #fitness it gets a lot of people,” she explained, “but if I put #crossfit or #paleo, those are the people who are actually interested in what I have to say.” Rosa’s deliberate management of her potential audience through tagging demonstrates a nuanced understanding of how digital spaces function rhetorically — knowing that her choices directly affect who encounters and engages with her writing.
Maria, who uses Twitter to document her experience as a first-generation college student, revealed how carefully she considers her audience before posting: “I think about who is going to see this. My professors follow me. My family. My friends. I have to think about all of them at once.” This simultaneous awareness of multiple potential audiences — what danah boyd calls “context collapse” in networked publics — shapes every rhetorical decision Maria makes online. Her navigation of this complexity demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of digital audience that many instructors might assume students lack.