Who is my audience?

The easiest audience to write for, and the one I most often find myself writing for, is myself. I know what I like, and it’s easy to judge (not always, but most of the time) whether I meet that criteria. Of course, writing for an audience that thinks and acts like has, the way I see it, two main flaws:
1. It’s boring. Sure I know what I like, but there are so many things I’ve never read that I could potentially enjoy reading. They may be uncomfortable to read, which means they would be even more uncomfortable to write. Writing using myself as a model audience biases me towards my comfort zone.
2. The world isn’t actually filled up with multiple mes (thank goodness). Some things I like are absolutely repulsive to other people. If I manage the (surprisingly difficult) task of writing something I like, there will still be more people than not that hate it (most likely).

With a little effort and tweaking, though, writing for an ideal audience comprised of people like me isn’t actually such a bad proposition. (If the world was made up of mes, I wouldn’t have to write anything at all, actually, because I would already know what I was going to say, right?)

But expanding the issue of audience to the kind of writing I’m doing for 21W.775, one of the main problems I see with environmental journalism is that, for the most part, the only people that will actually read it, not to mention buy what you are saying, are probably self-selecting environmentalists. That is, the only people who you will reach are the ones who already think the way you do. This isn’t, I’m sure, always the case, and it also doesn’t have to be a bad thing (as long as you use it to meet your goals). For example, you could write something that at first looks like the typical environmental essay and then completely frustrate the environmental-sympathizer audience after you’ve pulled them in (a la Evans). So, there are various things you can do with an essay that naturally attracts a certain type of audience. However, the aim of my essay is to make people who aren’t already environmentally conscious think about where their technology goes once they’ve disposed of it. I want people who don’t recycle to think about their electronic junk (although I’d like to speak to people who already recycle, as well). I want the people that are actually consuming and disposing off electronics and automobiles at a rapidly increasing pace to hear what I have to say. Ok, so maybe that’s a stiff demand, but to even attempt to do that I need to at least get people other than the pre-disposed-to-be-environmentally-sympathetic crowd to read it.

I may have this wrong, but I feel like a lot of the time when an article about environmentally-theme article comes out, say an article on global warming, a lot of people look at it and think “Oh, yet another environmental problem that no one can really do anything about, I don’t need to read that.” I want to find some way to circumvent this phenomenon. I want to make people think about what they are doing, what they are buying, and most importantly, what happens to things after they disappear from our lives. (Because they don’t, as it’s so easy to imagine, vanish completely).

But wait, that’s just what I feel like people would think…now I’ve just fallen back into using myself as a model. This is going to be harder than I thought.