ABSTRACT
Who is our audience for online discourse and how much control do we have in determining it? Perhaps more importantly, to what extent do our perceptions of audience in online environments influence how and what we write? Online text exists in formats that can be copied, forwarded, transmitted and archived with relative ease, and while such flexibility offers new textual opportunities for writers, it also alters more traditional notions of audience: as recent cases of misdirected email show, audience for online discourse can be a fluid and uncontrollable entity. (Examples abound of email messages written with particular correspondents in mind that are subsequently circulated either inadvertently or deliberately to readers unimagined by the original author.1) Given the role of audience in meaning-making, particularly in Bakhtinian constructs of the writerreader relationship (to be described below), this chapter asks what an awareness of the changed nature of audience in online environments might mean for writing, particularly in educational contexts where digital communication is increasingly encouraged.
