Disclaimer: Genre theory confuses me. I find it interesting and important, but nevertheless, I am confused. The following is a somewhat coherent rambling of ideas related to Monday's readings...
The Christian Science Monitor will be moving from a daily print edition to a daily online edition in 2009. CSM editor John Yemma says,
“This is a period of extreme financial difficulty for all news organizations. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., for instance, was asked at a conference in California on Oct. 22 whether the Times would be a print product in 10 years. "The heart of the answer must be (that) we can't care," Sulzberger said. He added that he expects print to be around for a long time but "we must be where people want us for our information."
(see full article here)
(see full article here)
I’m particularly interested in the connection between materiality and genre. The Christian Science Monitor is a newspaper that is held to a (generally) high standard, and I wonder how the reader/industry perception might change because of the print to online switch being made. Pennell is “drawn to and influenced by Anthony Pares and Graham Smart’s (1994) definition of genre as ‘a broad rhetorical strategy enacted within a community in order to regularize writer/reader transactions in ways that allow for the creation of particular knowledge’” (p. 78). At this moment, I’m not comfortable enough in my knowledge of genre (and the barrage of readings on genre from various classes this past week has confused me more...), so I’ll stick with Pares and Smart’s definition for now.
Because it’s that time in the semester when I really want to simplify things...
Anyway...how does the news genre (or any subgenre? of news) fit with the CSM’s switch from print to online publication? Does a change in materiality constitute a change in genre, or, as I’m guessing, is it more complicated than that?
Since Pennell also cites Carolyn Miller’s work on genre, I’ll take a look at that text for a moment. In the onset of her text, Miller explains that “one concern in rhetorical theory, then, is to make of rhetorical genre a stable classifying concept; another is to ensure that the concept is rhetorically sound” (p. 151). Rather than looking at “substance or form” (materiality?), Miller focuses on genre as a representation of “rhetorical action” (p. 151). Pennell argues that “ITexts, especially Internet genres, rely on [an] unfinished state of always being under construction” (p. 81). So, does this “dynamic nature” (as Pennell puts it) place the materiality of an online web site beyond the surface definitions of materiality (p. 81)? For example, an online newspaper (i.e. CSM) could be seen as a digital extension of the print edition. On the other hand, since the print edition is no longer the dominant publication of this news organization, could we consider the online CSM to be an extension of the organization? How does this complicate one’s idea of the genres involved?
Miller gives the following as one of four implications for understanding genre: “As meaningful action, genre is interpretable by means of rules; genre rules occur at a relatively high level on a hierarchy of rules for symbolic interaction” (p. 163). I’m having difficulty envisioning genre rules that apply to an IText. Other than an application of rhetorical rules, I think this is another area that begs for a new/revised theory. Graham and Whalen discuss a problem noted by Kress: “Much of genre theory has been developed for alphabetic practice” (p. 68). Hence Kress’ adoption of theory from the Australian genre school (Graham and Whalen, p. 68). Point being: the application of theory based in alphabetic texts creates problems for mixed-media texts.
To revert back to the first quote by Pennell: perhaps we should look at materiality and its position (?) as the “(infra)structures within which actors work” (Pennell, p. 83). With this in mind, I can see the online version (online materiality) of the CSM as the “(infra)structure” in which all actors involved interact. In this view, I think Miller’s understanding of genre as a social and/or rhetorical action fits well.
Because it’s that time in the semester when I really want to simplify things...
Anyway...how does the news genre (or any subgenre? of news) fit with the CSM’s switch from print to online publication? Does a change in materiality constitute a change in genre, or, as I’m guessing, is it more complicated than that?
Since Pennell also cites Carolyn Miller’s work on genre, I’ll take a look at that text for a moment. In the onset of her text, Miller explains that “one concern in rhetorical theory, then, is to make of rhetorical genre a stable classifying concept; another is to ensure that the concept is rhetorically sound” (p. 151). Rather than looking at “substance or form” (materiality?), Miller focuses on genre as a representation of “rhetorical action” (p. 151). Pennell argues that “ITexts, especially Internet genres, rely on [an] unfinished state of always being under construction” (p. 81). So, does this “dynamic nature” (as Pennell puts it) place the materiality of an online web site beyond the surface definitions of materiality (p. 81)? For example, an online newspaper (i.e. CSM) could be seen as a digital extension of the print edition. On the other hand, since the print edition is no longer the dominant publication of this news organization, could we consider the online CSM to be an extension of the organization? How does this complicate one’s idea of the genres involved?
Miller gives the following as one of four implications for understanding genre: “As meaningful action, genre is interpretable by means of rules; genre rules occur at a relatively high level on a hierarchy of rules for symbolic interaction” (p. 163). I’m having difficulty envisioning genre rules that apply to an IText. Other than an application of rhetorical rules, I think this is another area that begs for a new/revised theory. Graham and Whalen discuss a problem noted by Kress: “Much of genre theory has been developed for alphabetic practice” (p. 68). Hence Kress’ adoption of theory from the Australian genre school (Graham and Whalen, p. 68). Point being: the application of theory based in alphabetic texts creates problems for mixed-media texts.
To revert back to the first quote by Pennell: perhaps we should look at materiality and its position (?) as the “(infra)structures within which actors work” (Pennell, p. 83). With this in mind, I can see the online version (online materiality) of the CSM as the “(infra)structure” in which all actors involved interact. In this view, I think Miller’s understanding of genre as a social and/or rhetorical action fits well.
The photo at the top of this post is amusing: It pictures a rolled-up newspaper yet the CSM (in 2009) will be primarily an online publication.
1 comment:
I want to comment on what Caroline Miller says about genre as both a "stable classifying concept" and a representation of rhetorical action. I have been finding it hard to extricatre my understanding of genre from the article under discussion. My undertsanding is informed largely by Fairclough and his classification of genre as socially motivated action. Fairclough considers genre, "a way of acting in its discourse aspect" For example, there are various genres of interview, such as the job interview, the talk show interview, the research interview. But all of them are "doing" something. In the case of the websites, we have situated genres. I think, for example, of university home pages. They are all designed to "do" something similar--to carry out a specific social action. As such, they are always highy political--as are the home webpages of corporations. They both try to hail individuals in a certain sense. They are mediating action between and among social acors--and relevant social groups. So it seems to me that when we consider genre in relation to the design and construction of webites, etc, we should not forget that besides issues of user use, and audience, we need to think of the action that the sponsors of the site mean to initiate. In this sense, the design has a meaning potential that we can understand by looking to, say Kress and Van Leewn, who consdier social semitics in terms of visual representation and in combination with print text. Here we see that design has a functional visual grammar that is very much like a sytemic functional grmmar of grammar plays into
This is not to say that the genres within a website for instance, cannot be mixed--"doing" more than one thing at a time. But analyzing web pages it seems to me must be done on many levels because of the hypertextal abiliities. But whne we think of their design, we must think of the political moves the sponsors are making--is the genre one of marketing? Of governance? Some gneres are communicative, and some are strategic, so various relevant scoial groups will have various power and communicative staregies in mind when it comes to final presentation.
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