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Emerging Genres in New Media Environments
Abstract
This volume explores cultural innovation and transformation as revealed through the emergence of new media genres. New media have enabled what impresses most observers as a dizzying proliferation of new forms of communicative interaction and cultural production, provoking multimodal experimentation, and artistic and entrepreneurial innovation. Working with the concept of genre, scholars in multiple fields have begun to explore these processes of emergence, innovation, and stabilization. Genre has thus become newly important in game studies, library and information science, film and media studies, applied linguistics, rhetoric, literature, and elsewhere. Understood as social recognitions that embed histories, ideologies, and contradictions, genres function as recurrent social actions, helping to constitute culture. Because genres are dynamic sites of tension between stability and change, they are also sites of inventive potential. Emerging Genres in New Media Environments brings together compelling papers from scholars in Brazil, Canada, England, and the United States to illustrate how this inventive potential has been harnessed around the world.
Chapters (16)
This introductory chapter examines the nature of “emergence” as an explanatory concept for understanding genre innovation, contrasting it with the associated concept of “evolution,” which has also been used widely. In asking the question “Where do genres come from?” the author seeks to understand not only where they come from (that is, their antecedent conditions and causes), but also how they come about (that is, the social and material promoters of and motives for change), and why they “emerge” (that is, why their reception is seen as something new and different). A review of prior studies examines how genre has been conceived, how transformation is understood and documented, how causes and motives and conditions are characterized, and how the role of technological medium has been implicated.
How can new media bring out new genres? Taking a historical perspective, the author suggests that what is taken to be a new genre may in fact not be a new genre but an application of a new technology. Three phases (mid-19th-century photography; blogs; online news comment) show similar characteristics: the new technology is so widespread in its uptake that it seems to be a “mania” or “craze” beyond recognizable motivation; its uses are mixed and hard to classify; the period of unruly mixtures then gives way to orderly differentiation—to, that is, genres. These uses of new media, then, are not genres but “bridges to genre.” Such bridges are more like what Bakhtin called “primary genres” than the “secondary genres” usually recognized by rhetorical theory.
Scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and medicine are paying increasing attention to the genre of illness narratives. Little of this scholarship, however, focuses on online settings. To better understand these online stories and their structures, the author undertakes the analysis of a collection of patient diagnosis vlogs to argue that the characteristics of YouTube and the Internet more generally enable fluctuations or oscillations in these illness vlogs. These fluctuations foster genre emergence online and reflect the experiences of people living with these illnesses in a way discursive genres cannot. Paying attention to these fluctuations can add to our knowledge of the role of medium in genre emergence online and give us a potential mechanism to help explain the emergence, proliferation, and variability of online genres.
The author analyzes how Russian-language social media users reacted to the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor shower. Drawing on Kress’s social semiotic approach, the author presents a multimodal analysis of media uploaded to the Internet by users showing their reactions to the event, and demonstrates how new media users employ familiar primary and secondary speech genres to shape their reactions. This comparative analysis of videos and tweets helps conceptualize differences between primary and secondary speech genres by distinguishing the genres which are employed to communicate the event directly (primary) and the genres that are employed to engage with the discourse about the event (secondary). The author also explores how technological devices become associated with particular genres and how global genres become domesticated to culturally specific contexts.
The author critiques the emerging paradigm in the field of human–computer interaction known as the natural user interface (NUI), typically exemplified by gestural interfaces, haptic feedback systems, touch-sensitive displays, wearable hardware, and the like. Recent rhetorical theories about the canon of delivery, theories that consider the intersection of the body and technology in the act of communication, offer a lens through which we can read and interrogate the NUI, as well as the emergent genres of digital communication born of them. Left unexamined, the NUI paradigm potentially affords unequal degrees of access to users based on differences in class, gender, culture, race or ethnicity, ability, and other factors.
Game studies researchers have struggled with definitions of genre, defaulting to definitions that highlight game content and interaction differences. These categorizations focus on the feature-based nature of games and are not particularly useful for educational researchers interested in how games facilitate co-production and sharing among peers. A rhetorical conception of genre broadens our understanding of games, such that they become aspects of an environment and community where player participation and learning occur. The authors offer a description of one game that works as an exemplar in its dynamic engagement of players in building narrative objects (i.e. paratexts) that extend and co-produce an engaging learning world: This War of Mine. Ultimately the authors suggest that expansive play-learning can occur around games and within their genre ecologies.
Cyberjournalism as a social and dialogical practice has been characterized by four textual/discursive qualities that are involved in the transition from printed newspaper to digital newspaper: interactivity with the reader, linearity, multimodality, and information velocity. The author examines how these four qualities are exhibited in newspapers published in Brazil. The corpus is composed of 540 texts distributed in nine genres of printed and electronic versions of two Brazilian newspapers: Folha de São Paulo and O Globo. This investigation shows an increase in three of these characteristics in digital newspapers: interactivity with the reader, multimodality, and information velocity. In addition, the analysis of hypertext in these newspapers emphasizes nonlinear reading as an indispensable part in the process of meaning construction.
The author employs both rhetorical move analysis and corpus-assisted discourse analysis to examine online “patient narratives” collected from one of the largest AIDS discussion forums in the USA. Focusing on possible contraction of HIV/AIDS after perceived high-risk behaviors, this genre differs from traditional patient narratives because of its preoccupation with risk assessment and testing. Three types of rhetorical moves were identified, namely, informative, interactive, and emotional, which suggests posters’ need for accurate information, empathy, and communal support. Serving as an intermediary genre, the online risky AIDS narratives could help bridge the gap between at-risk populations and health communicators and public health educators to enhance the existing understanding of possible health, emotional, social, and psychological concerns that such individuals may have when seeking medical help.
Adaptation studies have long focused on the relationship of the source text to the adaptation, and overwhelmingly on the relationship between fiction or plays and the films derived from them, frequently with a focus on the fidelity of the adaptation to the source. But there is a substantial difference between film adaptation and videogame adaptations, where the relationship between adaptation and source is vastly different. Games always insist on their positioning within a videogame genre rather than their status as adaptation, as shown by the example of The Lord of the Rings. As a result, the important source is the game genre’s history. This genre-driven focus renders the relationship between a game adaptation and its literary or filmic source text a paratextual one.
The author considers the extent to which genre defiance is caught between typification and emergence. To what extent must atypical rhetorical actions mobilize socially recognizable types? Examining Amazon.com product reviews that deliberately defy genre expectations—and thus the market—in product reviews provides a case study to investigate genre defiance. We learn that rhetors cannot move into some kind of “genre-free” zone, but they can defy genre expectations using satire, parody, and reflexivity. Even genre defiance happens in relatively typified ways, which actually enables rhetors like defiant Amazon.com reviewers to reconstitute rhetorical situations and thus call for more fitting and recognizable responses to perceived exigencies.
The author attends to points of departure and continuity between literary autopathographies—autobiographical accounts of illness—and autopathographies produced in new media environments at the turn of the 21st century. Following an overview of early online autopathographic practices, the author engages in close readings of two artistic autopathographies rendered in digital media: Donald G. Rodney’s AUTOICON (2000) and Hannah Wilke’s Intra-Venus Tapes (1990–1993/2007). With these artworks positioned as “database autopathographies,” distinct forms of narrative and temporality are seen to play out in their reception. The comparison of diverse modes of autopathographic production allows an assessment of the extent to which and in what respects the passage from literature to artistic and new media environments entails an expansion of the autopathographic genre.
Analyzing the video archive of personal narratives curated by the Where Are You From? project, the author argues that public immigration discourses are conditioned by sentimentalism. Two effects of this generic conditioning are explicated. First, through the displacement of attention from a conflicted present to an imagined past, Americans may commemorate mythic immigrants while passing anti-immigration laws. Second, sentimentalism transposes immigration from a potentially deliberative to a perennially epideictic register. The author’s first implication is a rationale for generic awareness. If and when the only genre in which the public is able or willing to engage the subject of immigration is sentimentalism, moderating this impulse is prudent. A second implication pertains to the genre’s impact on spaces that are conceived and celebrated for public engagement.
The authors illuminate the rhetorical affordances of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, showing how it offers a complex ground for interrogating both the crisis of representation and the media and mediation of public memory within commemorative sites. In so doing, the authors address issues of (in)authenticity, emotional encounters with the past, and the media and mediation of memory to examine how commemorative sites, as a rhetorical genre, are undergoing a transformation in their social action, marking a shift from the performance of individual empathy to collective responsibility. The authors thus examine the inventional resources for ongoing social action that such a shift might entail, particularly in moving from a forensic or epideictic orientation to a more deliberative commemorative experience.
As digital readers gained popularity at the beginning of the 21st century, newspaper headlines voiced a growing anxiety among many consumers: “Will E-Books Eliminate Physical Books?” The author argues that genres are migrating into digital media forms and thus now demand attention to the material conditions that engender them. She begins by questioning the lay theory that modern readers have ever cared much about the physiology of reading, and contends that consumers are just beginning to miss what they will no longer know when their hands can’t be a vehicle to it. Chris Ware’s innovative transformation in Building Stories (2012) of a book into a “colorful keepsake box” provides a case for theorizing an embodied literacy predicated upon the haptics of reading.
The author invites scholars working in genre studies, feminist historiography, and the history of rhetoric to adopt an archaeological approach to genre, focusing on discarded, ephemeral, and non-dominant genres to investigate relations of power in communities of practice. Arguing that evolutionary metaphors for genre emergence and disappearance have served as terministic screens, deflecting our collective attention away from questions of materiality and power, this chapter outlines the affordances of an archaeological metaphor for genre change, drawing examples from the short-lived genres created by experimental ethnographers in the early 20th century.
Each chapter in the book has advanced different key issues for genre theory. Increasingly interdisciplinary, genre theory promises to be an important critical theory for exploring new media environments. The rhetorical, linguistic, and semiotic grounding of many of these perspectives offers a fresh import to new media studies by way of their consideration of situated and rhetorical language, discourse, and argument. This short postscript brings together the chapters’ contributions to chart future avenues for genre research.
Supplementary resource (1)
... And a person, using intellectualized literary language, "derive the pride, self-assurance and resourcefulness in the (new) ability to discuss the most complex of issues ranging from the mundane to academic and beyond" [6, p. 254]. Especially in the new forms and functional variants of communication (for example, in media): "...new forms of communicative interaction and cultural production, provoking multimodal experimentation, and artistic and entrepreneurial innovation" [11]. ...
... Understood as social recognitions that embed histories, ideologies, and contradictions, genres function as recurrent social actions, helping to constitute culture. Because genres are dynamic sites of tension between stability and change, they are also sites of inventive potential" [11] of a person / society to create the information, to verbalize the thoughts in different forms and manners, especially in media sphere. ...
The article verbalizes author's position, concerning the intellectualization of genre system of media communication (as a result of communication forms' changes in modern society) and determines the criteria for its professional analysis. These are linguistic, functional and stylistic, linguocultural and sociolinguistic dimensions of evolution of forms of social communication in mass-media sphere. The research focuses on the non-specific communicative principles of the dynamics of genres in traditional and new media, that, according to extra- and intralinguistic factors, provide different ways of fulfilling the tasks of communicative situation. The paper states actual nowadays medialinguistic aspectology for research of media genres in projection on language functions, realized in communicatively changing mass-media context, associated with psychological time and space of culture. Particular attention is paid to the dynamics of functional markers in genre paradigm of media space through the language and cognitive integration of new / traditional genres (post, comment, stories, giveaway, etc.), that in their functional combination form a macrotext, relevant for media communication nowadays. The author also touches upon discussion issues of modern communicative linguistics and media genre theory, that outline the prospects for further investigations in this scientific field: accuracy of nomination and status of certain genres, relevance / irrelevance of traditional for stylistics of the 2nd half of the 20th century genre factors – according to the modern genres of media communication, the diffuse nature of the intellectualization of mass media genre system, connected with appropriate / inappropriate differentiation of such categories, as hyper-genre, sub-genre, genre variety unit, etc.
Editorial is considered as a discursive genre of the English-language press. The concept of the discursive genre was developed by M. Montgomery on the example of mass media texts and allows us to combine the approach to considering the genre, on the one hand, as a recurrent stable structure, and on the other hand, to emphasize its mobility and variability. It is argued that this approach is especially relevant for media texts due to the existing difficulties in developing their typology and determining their status. The genre-forming features of editorial are highlighted: the use of colloquial speech, argumentativeness, intertextuality, high emotionality of the language, the presence of individual author’s nominations, as well as the use of discursive practices of recommendation and forecasting. The structure of the genre is defined: it is a three-stage model, where the conclusion plays a special role, which, in turn, can take such forms as conclusion-recommendations, conclusion-forecast, conclusion-evaluation, as well as various combinations of all three types of conclusions. It has been established that, from the point of view of content, the editorial covers the most pressing issues that are at the center of socio-political debates. The definition of editorial is given as a genre of high-quality English-language press, which acts as a tool for promoting the political interests of the newspaper and influencing public values and attitudes.
Different from previous linguistic studies on rhetoric, which primarily concern the ideational semantics and the logic of sentences, this article attempts to deal systematically with the interpersonal semantics of rhetoric by drawing on the comprehensive appraisal framework of systemic functional linguistics ( Martin and White 2005 ) and explores the mechanism of rhetorical persuasion in science communication via appraisal through a case study of the gene-modification (GM) debate in China. It first examines the rhetorical appeals of the subsystems of appraisal and then based on a self-constructed and coded corpus of GM debate discourses, it compares how institutional (the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and the Greenpeace Organization) and individual stakeholders (Cui Yongyuan and Fang Zhouzi) of different ideological interests in the GM debate mobilize the interpersonal semantic resources to rhetorical effects to persuade the audience of the safety/danger of the GM technology and products. The analysis reveals that while the opinion leaders choose ‘soft’ persuasion by heavily using affect and judgement resources, the institutions opt for ‘hard’ persuasion by utilizing more appreciation resources. The four parties all prefer contracting resources over expanding resources of engagement, which restricts the space of negotiation. Their communicative motives are interpreted through the lens of the rhetoric theory, and the implications and consequences for science communication in the post-truth era are discussed. Theoretically, the paper contributes to understanding the persuasion mechanism of appraisal and to understanding the science vs. society, and government vs. citizens relationship.
Partant d'un relatif constat d'échec des politiques culturelles françaises à l'heure de l'abondance culturelle, ce travail interroge les déterminants du choix de consommation culturelle et de l'accessibilité des offres par le prisme de la catégorisation des produits culturels. Une première partie aborde le problème par une étude de cas portant sur 12 plateformes culturelles numériques, puis par 12 entretiens semi-directifs auprès de consommateurs. Nous confrontons l’organisation du catalogue par le marché à l’organisation des répertoires culturels des consommateurs. Nous nous livrons ensuite à l’étude d’un marché particulier, celui de la musique classique en France, dont le public vieillit et se raréfie. Là encore, nous confrontons l’offre à la demande au travers de l’étude successive de 24 offres de concerts se présentant comme étant accessibles et de 12 entretiens semi-directifs auprès de consommateurs présentant divers niveaux d’affinité envers la musique classique. Par la mobilisation de deux cadres théoriques, l’étude des spectres de Derrida et la violence symbolique de Bourdieu, nous pensons le rôle des codes du concert de musique classique dans l’appréhension de l’expérience. Nos résultats questionnent les caractéristiques particulières que la littérature en marketing prête à la consommation culturelle et au produit culturel. Par le prisme de la catégorisation, nous montrons l’importance de l'anticipation de l'expérience dans le choix de l’expérience culturelle et son accessibilité, questionnons le caractère exploratoire de la consommation culturelle, et enjoignons la recherche à considérer l'ensemble de ses déterminants psychologiques, sociologiques et ceux liés au marché.
Writing As a Human Activity offers a collection of original essays that attempt to account for Charles Bazerman’s shaping influence on the field of writing studies. Through scholarly engagement with his ideas, the 16 chapters—written by authors from Asia, Europe, North America, and South America—address Bazerman’s foundational scholarship on academic and scientific writing, genre theory, activity theory, writing research, writing across the curriculum, writing pedagogy, the sociology of knowledge, new media and technology, and international aspects of writing. Collectively, the authors use Bazerman’s work as a touchstone to consider contemporary contexts of writing as a human activity.
У статті розкривається проблема нового статусу медіакомунікації в сучасну інформаційну епоху, так звану цифрову епоху (Sujon, Dyer, 2020). Медіакомунікація є дзеркалом динамічних змін у глобалізованому світі. Змінюються стилістичні форми, видозмінюються жанри, трансформуються мовні засоби. Основними чинниками таких змін є, зокрема, психологічні: людина ХХІ століття під впливом інформатизації та еволюції ЗМІ змінює свою мову. У дослідженні також розглядається проблема Manipulation 2.0 – відкриття нового типу маніпуляції в мультимедіа.
У статті представлені результати дослідження інтерференції в процесі вивчення англійської мови. Інтерференція розглядається як психологічне явище змішування кодів на рівні мовленнєвої діяльності окремих двомовних або багатомовних індивідів, яке може виникати як на підсвідомому, так і на свідомому рівнях. Автор досліджує полісемію як передумову інтерференції. Автор робить висновок, що в процесі мовлення мовна одиниця функціонує, з одного боку, як одиниця лексики, а з іншого – як компонент загальної структури пам’яті на основі асоціативних компонентів.
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