Digital genres: a challenge to traditional genre theory (9/10)

Digital genres: a challenge to

traditional genre theory

Inger Askehave and Anne Ellerup Nielsen

Faculty of Language and Business Communication, Aarhus School of Business,

Aarhus, Denmark

Information Technology & People

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to account for the genre characteristics of non-linear,

multi-modal, web-mediated documents. It involves a two-dimensional view on genres that allows one

to account for the fact that digital genres act not only as text but also as medium.

Design/methodology/approach – The theoretical framework of the article is the Swalesian genre

theory used in academic settings all over the world to investigate the relationship between discourse

and social practice and to teach genre conventions to students of language and communication. Up till

now most genre research has focused on the characteristics of “printed” texts, whereas less has been

done to apply the genre theory to digital genres.

Findings – The article discusses the characteristics of digital genres, notably the media constraints

that have a significant effect on the production and reception of digital genres and suggests an

extension of the Swalesian genre model that takes the digital characteristics into account.

Research limitations/implications – The suggestion for a revised genre model is not based on an

extensive empirical study of various types of web sites. The observation is restricted to a limited

number of commercial web sites.

Originality/value – The article proposes new insights into the concept of genre adapting traditional

models of genre theory to web-mediated texts. A revised two-dimensional genre model incorporating

media elements into the concept of genre thus takes account of the particular characteristics of the

navigation and reading elements of web-mediated genres.

Keywords Digital storage, Worldwide web, Hypertext Markup Language

Paper type Research paper

Recent years,

however, have seen a steady increase in genre research which deals with genres

transmitted through one of the most significant electronic media of today: the

internet[1]. This is no coincidence as the use of web-mediated communication has

skyrocketed during the last ten years, not least due to the immense popularity of the

internet among businesses and organisations worldwide. 

>>약간 경제적인 관점도 들어간 논문인듯

Our research purpose involves a controversial claim namely that it may be

necessary to incorporate the notion of “medium” into the notion of “genre”,

>>Swalesian genre model 이걸 바탕으로 대안 모델을 제안하는 논문인듯?

Ever since the “new”, functional genre movement began to gather momentum in the

early 1980s, there has been a widely-shared view that genres are best conceptualised as

goal-directed or purposive.

>>이 purposive라는 말을 저번 논문에서도 본 것 같은데.... 이때의 장르는 인문학/문학에서의 장르와 다른감?ㅠㅠ

 

J.R. Martin: “Genres are how things get

done, when language is used to accomplish them” (Martin, 1985, p. 250). Yates et al.

(1999, p. 84) define genres as “socially recognized types of communicative actions . . .

that are habitually enacted by members of a community to realize particular social

purposes. A genre may be identified by its socially recognized purpose and shared

characteristics of form.”.

장르의 정의 

 : 커뮤니케이션의 행위를 사회적으로 인지할 수 있게 유형화한 것. 커뮤니티 구성원들의 관습에 의해 특정한 사회적 목적을 인지하고... 장르는 형식에 대하여 특성을 공유하고 목적을 인지한다

 

A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of

communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the

parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale

shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of

content and style (Swales, 1990, p. 58).

>>부모 담론?ㅋ 재밌는데..

 

The communicative

purpose constitutes the rationale for the genre that means that the purpose of a genre

(what we try to accomplish in a social context) triggers a particular text structure and

– more often than not – a host of conventionalised verbal and visual rhetorical

strategies.

• rationale

  미국식 [_|rӕʃə^|nӕl] 영국식 [_|rӕʃə^|nɑ:l] 다른 뜻(1건) 예문보기

  (특정한 결정・행동 방침・신조 등의) 이유

  
  

(1) communicative purpose; realised by

(2) move structure; realised by

(3) rhetorical strategies.

 The communicative purpose of a genre-text (i.e. a typical

representative example of a genre) cannot be determined by looking at the text in

isolation.

<<<아! 그래서 장르를 보면서 상호텍스트성 이야기가 나오는거구나

 선행담화체로 장르 재규명 -> 장르는 단독 텍스트의 문제가 아님 -> 상호텍스트성 보게 됨

 If we want to establish what people accomplish by means of a particular text,

we have to turn to the context, the discourse community, in which the text is used.

>>discoursive community가 뭘까.. 담론 공동체? 

  그러고보니 은근히 discoursive란 말도 많이 나오네

“schematic structure” or “move structure”

 

Even though the structure of a genre is highly conventionalised, there is obviously

room for rhetorical variation and through the years researchers have tried to

incorporate this flexibility in the genre model, thereby modifying the claim of a “fixed”

staging structure with a specific number of moves and a predetermined sequence.

>>장르의 구조는 고도로 관습화되어 있지만, 수사학적인 변화(배리에이션)을 줄 수 있는 영역을 여전히 남아 있음  

   올ㅋ

<<어라 그래서 move structure 라고 한 건가?? 아까 이해가 안 갔는데..

 

Swales (1990) appears to base

his criteria on two different systems namely lexis and grammar and rhetorical function

(though most often the latter), Eggins (1994) relies solely on lexis and grammar, Martin

(1992) focuses on the layout of a text, suggesting that “titles, sub-titles, headings and

subheadings are commonly deployed to keep track of the composition structure [of the

texts]” (p. 443), while Bhatia (1993) concludes that “the ultimate criteria for assigning

discourse values to various moves is functional rather than formal” (p. 87).

3. The homepage as a web-mediated genre

The homepage can be defined as the top-level document of a web site[5] which

performs two overall functions[6]. First it introduces the user to the general content of

Even though the homepage is a new genre, it would be wrong to suggest that we

have never seen anything like it. In fact some of its main characteristics are replicates

of well-established discourses from the world outside the net.

 

This does not mean, however, that the

homepage is simply a digital version of already existing genres. As we shall see in the

sections to come, the fact that the homepage draws on a new kind of medium, namely

the WWW, adds to it a distinctiveness hitherto unseen in “traditional” genres. Thus the

WWW as a medium conveys unique properties to the homepage as a genre and this

co-existence of genre and medium, which seems to be ignored in traditional genre theory, is fundamental to web communication and must not be overlooked with trying to determine the genre characteristics of the homepage.

>>그렇다고 해서 홈페이지가 이미 있엇던 기존 장르의 단순한 디지털 버전은 아니다.

 WWW라는 미디어에는 전통 장르에서는 찾아볼 수 없었던 변별점이 있었고 이것이 독특한 특성을 홈페이지에 줘서 장르로서 성립하게...

 

<<맥루헌 언급되네욤 역시 우리쪽?

 

Therefore, the WWW should not be seen only as an important contextual feature of

web genres; rather the WWW is an integrated part of web genres.

>> WWW 자체가 하나의 장르

 

4.1 Multi-medianess

The WWW may be characterised as a main medium that integrates various

sub-mediums into one common format.

>>멀티 미디어가 웹의 특성이긴 하지..

 

the multi-medianess of web texts supplies the texts with a rich polysemous

potential where the web user is “invited” to participate actively in assigning meaning

in the process of text consumption (Landow, 1997; Bolter, 2001).

• polysemous

  미국식 [_|pɑ:li^|si:məs] 영국식 [_|pɒli^|si:məs] 다른 뜻(1건) 예문보기

  여러 뜻을 가진, 다의(多意)의

  
  

“reading-as-such” being one mode (the reading mode); and the navigating

mode (or linking mode) being the other[11]. The “reading mode” leaves the user in a

traditional reader position with sequential reading as the guiding principle (similar to

traditional reading, no matter whether the actual reading is strictly linear or not). The

“navigating mode” allows the reader to navigate the site and actively construct his/her

own reading path through one or several sites. So when consuming web texts, the web

user employs two different cognitive capacities and demonstrates two different types

of behaviour when s/he shifts from the reading to the navigating mode and vice versa.

The concept of “modal shifts” in hypertext reading offers an interesting perspective

on web genres and seems to be an extremely useful tool for a refinement of the

traditional genre analysis model. We suggest that the analysis of web genres should be

centred round the two modes. Thus when we consider the use of the text in the reading

mode, the traditional genre analysis model seems to be an appropriate tool for a genre

description (because in this mode, text consumption is in fact not very different from

traditional texts). What we need then is an extension of the genre model to account for

the fact that a web text also functions in the navigating mode where the text, due to its

media constraints, becomes an interactive medium, used actively to navigate the web

site.

>>리딩 모드와 내비게이팅 모드.. 전통적인 장르 분석 모드를 개정하는 데 씁시다

<<개인 홈페이지가 아니라 어떤 웹 페이지의 형식 자체를 보는 논문이 아닐까?

7. Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to “up-grade” the genre model and suggest ways in which

the traditional model could be extended to account for web-mediated texts.

Therefore, the notion of

modal shifts – where the web user alternates between reading the text and navigating

the medium – was introduced.

>>그래서 이게 도입됨여

 The most significant addition to the traditional genre model was the

introduction of links as functional constituents in web documents.

A systematic characterization of web-mediated genres was outside the scope of this

article, as we only used the danisco.com homepage as exemplary material in our

theoretical discussion and ended up with a tentative characterisation of the homepage

as one of the first conventionalised, digital genres.

>>홈페이지는 최초의 관습화된 디지털 장르이다

 >> 오올 ㅇㅁㅇ

 Finally, in the article we suggest that web genres cannot be characterised as genres

in isolation from their medium.

For instance a brochure is sometimes classified as a medium (in terms of

format) and sometimes as a genre (in terms of its communicative purpose). The same

duality seems to characterise a wide range of other every-day texts such as letters,

posters, direct mails, etc. We suggest a closer investigation into these concepts which

may help clarify the difference between medium and genre – or which (as we do here)

acknowledges that in some cases we may talk about “media genres” – where the two

seem to be inseparable because the media is not only a distribution channel but also a

carrier of meaning, determining aspect of social practice (how a text is used, by whom

it is used, and for what purpose).

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