Google Blog Search & Former Audiences

Results 1–10 of about 8,678 for ‘sorry-​​for-​​not-​​posting’ (0.06 seconds)

Results 1–10 of about 223,303 for ‘I-​​am-​​sorry’ (0.10 seconds)

Results 1–10 of about 2,477 for ‘very-​​busy-​​with-​​work’ (0.07 seconds)

Results 1–10 of about 2,592 for ‘I-​​will-​​try-​​harder’ (0.08 seconds)

We had a cool event yes­terday at work on the subject ‘Do Agencies Innovate?’, so that knocked out last night (far-​​too-​​long and elab­orate write-​​up here). Excellent speakers and great debate from the audience.

I want to know a better word for ‘audience’ in this sort of scenario, and the sort of involve­ment in the creation of media that we write about. I see ‘the former audience’ (scare quotes not optional) quite fre­quently, but that seems a bit poncy. I tried to use the word ‘par­ti­cipants’ in my write up since that seemed best to capture what these par­tic­ular events are about. It’s like a Roman forum, with the pan­el­lists as senators, I guess. But at the same time, I find ‘par­ti­cipants’ a bit of a mouthful, too.

I could just say ‘people’, but how would you construe this: “One of the par­ti­cipants, X from Y, said that blah blah blah”. One of the people? bleuch!

Delegates, maybe? But that seems to imply that we totally identify with the organ­isa­tions we work for and those organ­isa­tions speak with one voice.

It seems like a petty, semantic quibble, but if you can’t find an elegant, demotic way to say what you mean, then that means this new envir­on­ment isn’t quite cul­tur­ally accepted yet. Maybe it’s like the word ‘chair’. People used to laugh when you used it as a replace­ment for ‘chairman’. You don’t see many people laughing now.

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7 comments to Google Blog Search & Former Audiences

  • People should gen­er­ally refer to each other as dude or dudette! :-)

  • Promising… not entirely sure it has the gravitas I was looking for, but still.

  • You got me on this one. I was thinking of par­ti­cipant, member, user, con­stituent, citizen, overseer, com­mittee members, etc.

    It’s some­thing I’ve never thought about really, but the fact that I haven’t thought about it disturbs me more than not being able to come up with a good term.

    It reminds me of Wittgenstein’s “logik,” which goes some­thing like, “that which is not spoken, is most important.”

  • Very useful comment. Like the post­mod­ern­ists’ idea of the space between the words being the most telling. Is our culture so hooked into the idea of per­former and audience that it can’t (yet) verb­alise a dif­ferent state of affairs?

  • You could use game ter­min­o­logy to lighten the load — players, com­pet­itors, entrants, dice-​​throwers?

    It just seems that “people” is the best general descrip­tion of all. We know the vagaries of people, so it covers all the bases.

  • I like dice-​​throwers! I mean isn’t that what it’s all about ANYWAY?!!! :)

    People>peupel,>populus>

    People meaning: ““body of persons com­prising a community.”

    Ian, isn’t “com­munity” the oper­ative term? Audience is NOT com­munity. Audience is a sudden grouping. Community is some­thing more per­sistent. A per­sistent “audience” is a community.

  • Better yet…a per­sistent, inter­active audience is a community…somehow com­munity is one of those words that is greater than the sum of its parts. So the word “audience” is still lackluster…it doesn’t fulfill community.

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