Blog 4: Genre

Blog 4: Genre

Image 1: the creation of genres

The Oxford Dictionary (2013) defines genre as a style or category of art, music, or literature: a style or category of art, music, or literature. Dr Ariella Van  Luyn, in this week’s podcasts, looked at explaining genre in more depth. She explains that texts and cultural products are grouped into classes based on similarities of their shared conventions and work as a way to express oneself. A genre is socially based dialogues that are used to help people decipher and produce such texts. McNeil ( 2011) discusses the idea that through the change of technology there has been a change in genres and that even though blogs do have the potential to change their genre becoming one of their own they are more so an adaptation of the diary but are able to utilize web tools.

Instagram enables a new type of visual story telling genre that people can use to communicate with society. This genre is similar to a diary genre because quite often people are telling stories about their lives and through the use of captioning you are able to see a glimpse into their ideas and thought processes behind certain things. A picture is worth a thousand words is a famous quote used by many. I believe this quote can be greatly related to the virtual network ‘Instagram’ as people use a simple picture to tell their story to their followers. It is then up to their followers to make whatever inferences from these pictures and draw a conclusion about the person posting the,

References:

McNeil, L. (2011). Diary 2.0?: A genre moves from page to screen, in Rowe, C. & Wyss, E.L. (Eds). Language and new media: Linguistic, cultural and technological evolutions. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.

Image Credit:

Image 1: retrieved from http://endlessorigami.com/comics/2010-11-10-inventing_a_music_genre.png on 3rd September 2013