5.31 Reading Response

Texts:
Bawarshi & Rieff: Chap 9: Public and New Media Contexts
Miller & Shepherd: Blogosphere

Bawarshi and Rieff open chapter 9 by mentioning that “genres function as sites of ideological action” (151), immediately leading me to think again about the discussion we had on ideology and genre in class. When discussing the shifting and complex relationship of participants in a public genre system, Bawarshi and Rieff point out that while “generic encompassment preserves the community and goals of the participants, it also regenerates the genre, thus regenerating the community and mediating between ‘outlanders’ and ‘inlanders’” (157). I think that this is important because we can see how the ideologies encompassed in these public genres plays a role in contributing to a sort of social hierarchy; this connects to our discussion of the constraints that genres can impose. By mediating between insiders and outsiders, genres allow their users to establish kind of a dominance or display a sort of power relationship.

Another point I found interesting was that while genres can constrain action or change, they can also bring about changes in behavior or public policy (158). This shows the contradiction that they can be both limiting and enabling at the same time. Bawarshi and Rieff explain that the social function of public genres is to bring about action and/or change (159). Genres both enable participation in public processes and limit intervention and social action (159).

I found chapter 9 particularly interesting in its discussion on genres and new media because this ties into what I am focusing my genre analysis on. I’m looking at online news articles and I am particularly interested in how this context differs compared to that of the print articles. In my analysis I’ve already noticed a variety of elements that have changed in the news article genre just because of the medium shift. Bawarshi and Rieff mention various studies that explore how print genres are imported into new mediums and how genres may develop or emerge in electronic environments (160). New electronic technologies have increased demand for more efficient and effective forms of interaction (166), changing our previous expectations of genre. They mention “genre re-mediation,” which is “how familiar genres are imported into new mediums,” and how new ways of communicating through new media have changed the “generic landscape” (160). Bawarshi and Rieff point out that not only is this remediation important, but its also interesting how these new digital contexts change access to genres, reconfigure constraints, and create new forms of collaboration (161).  The changes brought about by technology and new media literacies have prompted multimedia and multimodal works, in turn leading to hybrid genres (160-1). Problems and opportunities are brought up by this “recontexctualization” as multimedia and multimodal texts “interact within new genre ecologies and systems and genres media discourse activities across contexts and medium (170). To look at this issue, Bawarshi and Rieff argue that we must look at how existing genres and genre systems are imported, how they are improvised, and learn about new and emerging genres (170). I think that my genre analysis will tie into exactly what Bawarshi and Reiff are talking about and I am interested to see how my work compares to what others have found in similar situations.