Fake audience? Ooooh Nooo!

Unlike On Rhetoric, I enjoyed Ong's text about the audience.  Not that I agreed with everything he wrote, but it all resonated with me.  I thought one of his best concept's was the idea of the audience as "fictionalized."  Me draws a parallel between the audience of an orator and explains that because "For the speaker, the audience is in front of him.  For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both" (10).  First I like the idea of readership in space.  I imagine a librarian floating around in the black (Firefly reference).  But back to the text.  He makes an excellent point.  Because the orator has an audience in front of him, that audience becomes what he defines as a "Collective"; in which everyone experiences everything the orator says at once.

Writing doesn't have that same effect because the author has his readers experiencing his writing at different points in time with or without other people experiencing with them.  He describes how "The audience immediately fragments.  It is no longer a unit.  Each individual retires into his microcosm...The speaker has to gather them into a collective once more" (11).  In other words, when one reads, they read separately from everyone else, thereby separating from the rest of the collective.  Here's where I feel Ong loses me because I sense a rift in his argument.

When Obama spoke at my school, that was in front of an audience.  I was a member of that audience.  When he spoke about healthcare, I recall people cheering, but not me (I'm not a fan of the plan.  I'll admit it).  Does that separate me from the collective the same way in which a reader has a separate experience from other readers reading the same book?  I could argue that we all think of our own volition, therefore, the experience we each have during an oral presentation varies from the person next to us.  That dissolves the collectively mentally because we're no longer a unit.  Does that make sense?  So back to whether or not the audience is real.  It's either not real at all in both scenarios or real in both without a collective.  I'll elaborate in class, but I'm going to miss my bus if I keep typing.