Undifferentiated media?

I came across this quote from Yates & Sumner (1997) :

"Given that the technology itself often does not differentiate between texts, unlike print or writing where the copy of ‘War and Peace’ is destined for a shelf and the ‘yellow sticky’ for the bin, genres increasingly help orientate users to the document and help them evaluate the nature of the document. The overall import of genres comes from the role they play in differentiating between documents, which are constructed and delivered through an otherwise undifferentiated digital medium."

This struck me because I have been thinking of all the various genre exploding out of the technology and that lead to the assumption that the various media were also exploding, but in a sense they are all the same. That might be more of a problem than the variety. Everything gets saved, so we have blogs that are notes for researchers, like this one, and then thee are archived formal, edited papers which are more considered. Both are searchable and often found with the same search terms.

This might be a key to evaluation - What is the genre in which the text is posted?

verbal texts

I just was thinking about blogs and on-line discussions of various sorts and I realized that in most traditional discussions of genre, verbal texts are ignored. When we talk about an academic paper, we do not have a way of discussing the many discussions that went into refining the ideas that come out in the paper. For students, often the final paper may be a write up of a presentation in a seminar. For researchers, we may present our ideas several times before we have the particular angle we want to pursue in a formal article. These verbal texts are an unmentioned under pinning of various genre. (Note: I have to dig into the literature, but I don recall more than a passing mention of these genre and then in the context of discourse analysis.)

In ESL we might be more aware of this because we often overtly teach discussion skills as part of an ESL or EAP program. There are a lot of materials for discussion leaders, feedback in discussion, functions such as asking for clarification, etc. The PResentation and Seminar classes in the SPS EC program have a lot of these sorts of things. 

Then, in the genre that are emerging on the internet, we often talk about on-line discussions. We are trying to find genre names a that match earlier, pre-internet work. What is the match for a blog? A notebook?  A diary? A journal? All of these, or none? If we think of genre as an outgrowth of a discourse community, then these more chatty sorts of on-line activities are not mentioned in the lit for off-line texts. Yet, they are part of the core of the new genre that get mentioned. 

In the off-line world, many hundreds of years of conversations preceded the emergence of the wealth of texts. Think of all the discussions in medieval universities before on or two authors wrote things down. Perhaps we are in a similar era for on-line texts. What arises in the future in terms of on-line journals or research may be very different from what we know now in terms of editorial/peer review, format, references, multimedia materials and more. On the other hand, perhaps the internet morphs into a ubiquitous background of information ala the semantic web.

Still, in many ways we are comparing apples and oranges in comparing on-line and off-line texts. We need a new vocabulary to talk about the on-line genre and then also a meta-vocabulary to talk about both.

Beginnings

This is the start of a blog to chronicle my research into emerging genre in the exploding world of new media. I will use this space to record thoughts, notes, and links.