Audience analysis in cyberspace: defining the invisible

In her book Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: the Online Protests Over Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper Chip, Laura Gurak discusses the performance of audience analysis in cyberspace by tracing the history of two online communities and studying their composition and structure. Traditionally, identifying target users in audience analysis is a relatively seamless task. The technical writer first might discuss audience with her client or employer and then visit the job site, interview probable users, and hypothesize about audience needs, expectations, and mindset. The direct, person-toperson contact of writer and users increases the ease and efficiency of this process. The writer gains audience information by actually seeing the users. In person, the writer can observe the users at work and gauge visual cues, such as body language and facial expressions. For the writer, such tangible information decreases guesswork and discourages over-generalization about the target audience. But how does audience analysis change when this tangible information is not available? Without personal contact, the writer must validate her assumptions about users only through secondary sources, such as "typical" scenarios or prior experiences. The target audience's rich demography, which includes both individual and communal elements, easily can be lost in secondary sources. If the writer does not interact with an actual group of people, she may fall more readily into generalizations and overlook the importance of users' individuality. For example, considerations of gender and socioeconomic status may become diluted. Likewise, each group of users forms its own community based on shared skill sets, social/ political concerns, and modes of communication. In her analysis, the writer must consider these group dynamics, yet they are difficult to visualize abstractly. Audience analysis in cyberspace, however, requires such abstract visualization. While still bound by common interests and concerns, cyberspace communities are not physical entities. Members "meet" through electrical impulses, not in a conference room or at a neighborhood party. This forum allows for a higher degree of anonymity; in cyberspace, a person can mask his age, gender, and physical attributes. The same person can make statementstrue or false--about any array of subjects without worrying if his body language supports his spoken words. Clearly, cyberspace is a communication medium of loud invisibility that does not support traditional methods of audience analysis. So how does a technical writer perform audience analysis in cyberspace? In her book Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace, Laura Gurak tackles this question by tracing the history of two online communities and exploring their composition and structure. Using case studies of the cyberspace protest movements against the Lotus MarketPlace CD.ROM directmail marketing database and the Clipper chip encryption device, she studies several major elements of audience demography including community hierarchy, mode of communication (i.e., system of information delivery), and gender. Gurak offers a detailed discussion of these elements and understands their importance for technical writers working in fields that are increasingly focused on cyberspace: if technical writers are to create clear, usable online documentation, they must know how cyberspace communities function and how these communities vary from traditional audiences. To expound on this claim, I will review Gurak's discussion of the roles of hierarchy, system of delivery, and