We got this wrong when Mass Comm started to influence rhetorical instruction. Rhetoric moved from readers and listeners in the individual to Audiences in the collective.

[more - leading to a toc:]

• Readers - Barthes knew this - construct meaning given what the author presents. That construction is governed by cultural (semiotic) codes that readers are more or less aware of.
• Kress - places author and reader is a diametric relation: each must do their part in creating meaning. Readers must work as writers do because meaning is semiotically constructed.
• Kress - the work readers and writers do is a measure of the social position of each.
• Peroc, in Life A Users Guide, demonstrates how it works - and notes that it is always a failed project.
• McLuhan theorized the context, the ecosystem, to elucidate how it operates below the conscious level - as an ideology.
• Burnett (How Images Think) creates a sketch for new media.
• Modernism (Pound, Eliot) created an aesthetic for it. The poet is the antenna the time - which demands readers do more than receive.
• The Listener and the Reader
• A Rich Concept of the Reader
• something more extensive for new media
• something extensive for hypertext: The hypertext reader explores
• the role of literary crit is to bring out how making meaning works.