Genre Criticism - Genres Studies in New Media

Genres Studies in New Media

Recently scholars and researchers in rhetoric, linguistics, and information sciences have begun to explore the relationships between new media and socio-contextual genre theories (like those of Carolyn Miller, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Charles Bazerman). These researchers have expressed concerns about the appropriateness of traditional genre theory for new media communication. Some scholars have argued that since genre theory was originally developed to describe written texts, the theory needs to be modified to account for nonlinguistic communication. Linguist and semiotician Gunter Kress suggested that much of the vocabulary of generic analysis is ill-equipped to address non-written communication, arguing that “there are no genre terms for describing what drawing is or does…” Similarly, rhetoricians Miller and Shepherd have argued that traditional written genre theory does not appropriately address the visual features of a genre’s format.

Rhetoricians and information scientists have also pointed out that new media genres may develop and formalize more quickly than traditional written genres. The authors of the article "Genres and the web" argue that the personal home page is functioning as a new and discrete genre, and they explore the entirely digital nature of home pages, suggesting that home pages “have no obvious paper equivalent”. Additionally recent work in new media genre theory has explored how new communication technologies allows for forms of “genre hybridity.” Spinuzzi, for example, explores what can happen when multiple related genres are remediated into a single new media artifact.