The Stranger Audience

In the act of writing this post, I am taking my perceptions of the audience into consideration, and therefore somewhat fictionalizing you.  This is the basic foundation underlying Ong's paper.  That through the actions of reading and writing, the audience becomes fictionalized.  The audience must adapt and discard some part of themselves and take up a disguise to fill their intended roles.  In essence, writing requires the capability of transformation in a reader more than oral communication requires in a listener.  This is because of the differences in information presented through the two.

One of the most evident, in Ong's opinion, was the presence of the audience.  Speech occurs in the present, it is live.  "...spoken word is part of present actuality and has its meaning established by the total situation in which it comes into being.  Context for the spoken word is simply present, centered in the person speaking and the one or ones to whom he addresses himself and to..." (Ong 10).  The orator does not have to fictionalize his audience, although to a limiting extent the orator relies on his own perceptions of the audience.  The orator simply has to speak and react to the masks being worn by the audience.  On the other hand, a writer must imagine the masks of his audience.  In doing so, the writer creates an audience, an expected attendance of masks.

This brings to my mind an intriguing possibility concerning the social aspects of oral communication and literature.  In speech, the speaker is constantly gauging and reacting to the audience.  This is partly because the speaker is working towards a social casting.  The speaker is trying to affect the audience in a way and in doing so affects their opinion of the speaker.  The speaker words can be received and praised, or ignored and rejected.  As such, the the ability to adapt and affect and audience is appreciated in a speaker, as it is in a writer.  However, in a writer this effect is delayed, there is not as strong of an association between the text and the writer as between the orator and the speech.  In text there is more room for leniency and more room for interpretation.  This could be due to the distance a text creates between its author and audience, however, my question is of its service.  Could the distance created between the writer and the writer's audience be an adaptation in itself to account for the dynamic between a speaker and his audience.  In other words, does the distance between author and audience serve as a protective adaptation against social endangerment in the same way as an orator's ability to react to an audience?