Involving the Audience: A Rhetorical Perspective on Using Social Media to Improve Websites

摘要

Technical and professional communication (TPC) is largely marked by attentiveness to audience. Blakeslee (2009) underscores this facet of the field's character, urging scholars to explore how the growth of digital environments influences approaches to audience. Much like scholars in rhetoric, composition, and TPC, Blakeslee argues for a rhetorical, contextual understanding of audience. But now, 10 years later, this call to examine digital audiences is reinforced by the proliferation of even more digital spaces, specifically ubiquitous social media platforms. Breuch's Involving the Audience: A Rhetoric Perspective on Using Social Media to Improve Websites revisits and extends Blakeslee's call by examining how social media audiences volunteer rich feedback for usability work. This text offers detailed discussions of research and usability methods for studying social media feedback, while also constructing a solid rhetorical grounding for exploring how social media have changed conceptions of audience. Breuch connects applied usability work with theoretical concepts of audience and argues for "social web usability," the addition of social media feedback in complementing traditional usability methods for Web site design. More specifically, she claims that listening to "real-time, authentic" social media audience feedback on Web site design allows for a more comprehensive view of context, encourages dialogue with audiences, and better supports rapid iterative design processes (p. 2). Yet at the core of Breuch's work are questions about what consulting social media feedback in usability work can reveal about the rhetorical nature of audience involvement. The case studies she presents tell the stories of two public Web site launches in Minnesota-the health-care exchange site, MNsure.org, and the Hennepin County Library system Web site, Hclib.org-and the value of audience responses in fixing Web site usability issues. However, as she explains, these case studies are also specific examples of how social media audiences function rhetorically to initiate change when problems arise. In doing so, they actively participate in social Web usability efforts.