This term the students in my Internet class have been learning to analyze how
genres fit into activities. They are each writing papers that analyze three
genres -- one primarily textual, one primarily image-based, and one on the
Internet. Their case studies include rave posters, political advertisements,
abstract expressionist paintings, grafitti, Philippino comedy films, how-to
books, real estate ads, and anarchist propaganda posters. They are using a
five-part conceptual framework that owes much to Chuck Bazerman and various
aspects of social theory:
* communities -- groups of people who occupy analogous structural
locations in society (college professors, Ford customers, people
with cancer, parents, etc), whether or not these people know one
another or have any organizations or channels of communication
* relationships -- these "locations" are defined in large part by
their relationships to other locations (parents have children,
employees have bosses, salespeople have customers, actors have
audiences, and so on)
* activities -- the life of a given community is frequently organized
in large part as a repertoire of typified activities (going to a
movie on a date, administering a quarterly performance evaluation,
writing comments on a draft paper, etc)
* genres -- expectable forms of communication that embody strategies
of their creators and fit into forms of activity of their consumers
(the term is thus construed very broadly, so that Interstate Highway
signs are a genre, as well as romance novels, western movies, IRS
forms, and so on)
* media -- the technical substrate of communication (radio, newspapers,
posters, face to face conversation, electronic mail, etc)
The idea in analyzing a genre is to see how it "fits" into a social context.
One might start with a given genre of interest (subpoenas), note which
medium it's in (paper forms), pick a community nearby it (lawyers, etc),
identify some of the typified activities around it (court proceedings, etc),
map out some of the relationships that are at stake in those activities
(lawyer-client-judge-prosecutor-witness-etc), list the other genres that
are implicated in those activities & relationships (briefs, dockets, wanted
posters, cross-examination queries, etc), and so forth and so on. Having
done this, one is then in a position to turn back around and, so to speak,
"rediscover" the original genre as one part of a larger social system.
It then becomes possible to answer (more importantly, to *ask*) questions
like, What sort of social circuitry does information flow through in this
world? What interests, compatible or contradictory, can be seen at work in
the form of the genre? *Is* the genre in fact well-fitted to the activity
in which it is used? If we wanted to move the genre to another medium (say,
the Internet), how should we redesign it along the way? What questions do
people bring to instances of the genre, given both the practical situations
in which they refer to it and the expectations they bring from previous
interactions with the genre?
The students' draft papers are on the Web. Here is the URL to find them:
http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/internet-papers.html
We're putting the papers online because we believe that papers are written
by members of communities, not by isolated individuals. Online drafts can
easily be read and commented on by other members of the community, and these
comments can improve the paper and lessen paranoia about expectations. The
commenting process is useful to both the author and commentator, both for
stimulating thought and for building relationships.
It would be just great if you wanted to read one of the papers and offer
comments to its author. The papers are due on March 19th, so any comments
through the weekend of the 16th would be helpful.
Now of course this model for soliciting comments won't scale up -- what would
happen if a hundred classes did it? But I wonder if we could set up some kind
of commenting cooperative. Students in classes on a similar topic during a
given term could exchange comments on one another's papers over the net. Of
course, the students within a class can offer comments as well, but I think
it would be rewarding for the students to get comments from people at other
schools with other backgrounds.
Phil Agre