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Abstract. This article explores the implications of integrating a reception-based approach to audience studies into the current conception of the rhetorical audience. It asserts that by tracing the contours of online audience response to a rhetorical text, a "commenting persona" emerges that can speak on behalf of the text's actual audience. This commenting persona, then, fills a gap in the popular "persona" theory of the rhetorical audience by locating a persona that resides outside of the rhetorical text, rather than being a projection created within the text. The article hopes to provide a theoretical framework for rhetorical scholars to integrate reception theory into their analysis of the after-life of rhetorical text and the response by the actual audiences that consume them.
Keywords: Digital Audience; Reception Studies; Rhetoric; New Media; Online Persona.
Introduction
On January 21, 2017, one day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, hundreds of thousands of women and men flooded the Washington D.C. Mall for the Women's March on Washington (Przybyla & Schouten 2017). An estimated 2.6 million people participated in the Women's March worldwide, and the event was called "the largest single-day demonstration recorded in U.S. History" (Chenoweth & Pressman 2017). Though the Women's March claimed to represent "all women," conversations surrounding the event on social media made it clear that the message of the march was not received positively by everyone. This was evidenced through the trending hashtag #notmymarch, and thousands of comments on social media platforms disparaging the march.
The Women's March's troubled after life on the internet is evidence of a larger trend of the power of digital audiences to change the original narrative of a text through comments and conversation. For the field of rhetorical studies, the importance of grappling with audience reception of rhetorical texts in the digital age cannot be overstated. Audience has historically been a complicated topic in rhetorical theory because there is a gap between the projected audience (the audience that the speaker or text wants their messaged to be received by) and the actual audience (the people who consume the message, whether or not they were the intended audience of the rhetor). Technological advances such as the internet, smartphones, and social media have increased the potential for misalignments between the projected...