A couple days ago I wrote Publish button pangs, about the tension I feel before hitting the publish button on a blog post. I know it’s going to an audience and I want it to be perfect, even though I’m keenly aware that I will often make mistakes. Aaron Davis wrote a comment on that post and he shared:
This touches on Clive Thompson’s argument for the power of public:
Many people have told me that they feel the dynamic kick in with even a tiny handful of viewers. I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million.
There is a lot of merit in this quote that Aaron shared. I remember teaching science and introducing Grade 8 students to wikis back in 2007. I had one ELL – English Language Learner – in my class that was quite low, and I could never get him to edit and improve his writing after handing in something. Then we started our wiki and he had his own project page (it was on the now defunct Wikispaces or I’d share it here). On this sight I had a little widget called Meebo that let me know when people were on this site, and allowed me to chat with them (they got a random number as a username, and could change that to their actual name). I remember about midway through the project I started seeing this ELL boy online after 10pm and would often end up telling him to go to bed, via the Meebo widget, closer to midnight. After about 3 days of seeing him on this site late at night, I decided to go into the wiki history and see if there was any activity by him, or was he jus looking around? It turned out he was there editing his work! There were small changes, mostly grammatical, but there was no doubt that he was working on improving his page. See An Authentic Audience Matters for more on this idea project and idea.
When a student hands in work to a teacher, there isn’t an audience, there is an assessor. No one is ‘seeing’ the work, it’s ‘just going to the teacher’. When a student has to share work with the class, suddenly there is an audience. When a student has to share something online, then there is a ‘real’ audience… even if no one is going to the page, the perception of there being one more (or 10 more) people watching changes the student’s perception of the importance to do a good job.
One counterpoint to this Clive Thompson quote:
“I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million.”
Social media is changing this. One of my daughters, when she was younger, used to delete her Instagram posts that didn’t have a minimum threshold of ‘Likes’. Social media seems to put a bit more emphasis on popularity and a larger audiences. That same daughter though, was happy when Instagram made the shift to not letting the public see how many likes were on a post. She thought that was a great decision. So, with young students there is definitely a greater emphasis, pressure, or focus on the size of the audience.
That said, I do believe that the critical idea of having a ‘plus one’, having an audience that is bigger and unknown, increases the stakes for many, and helps inspire them to do better work. I know that’s true for me.
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