Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Community-minded genres. In a paper on genre, Leen Breure sketches Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about the genre as shaping tools for communication:
For Bakhtin genres are not simply sets of rules and conventions, but ways of conceptualizing reality, forms of seeing and interpreting particular aspects of the world. They are connected with expectations about length and compositional structure. They are the fundamental molds in which we cast communication.
As a genre, then, blogging is a way of thinking, seeing, interpreting, and speaking, or perhaps more than one way. No doubt it arises from the needs and opportunities of our social circumstance; I wonder, therefore, whether the students who aren't much tempted by the genre find ways to duplicate the work bloggers do in some other genre, or perhaps they don't see a need for that kind of work or a value or hope in it. Breure says that "genre conventions signal a discourse community's norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology" -- perhaps the alienation in this case is not only from a particular genre, blogging, but from community life itself, where genre norms reside . . . at least the sort of life that supports a commitment to community.
Think, for example, of the large percentage of people who are said _not_ to support the listener-supported radio stations that they themselves listen to. It's a relatively passive medium, so while people might be willing to take a tote bag with station logo to the beach, they are often not willing to do much more than that. Listen, yes, perhaps contribute, but more likely not . . . That might be an example of individuals without strong community sense, so they have no place to develop community-minded genres. They (we) know how to receive, to watch or listen, but not to write in an active, community-shaping genre, and not surprisingly.
So we need to know more about community-minded genres -- how they work, how people work in them, how people learn them, and especially how people find their independence and commitment within them. In that spirit, I will be interested to see what happens at New Communities, a neighborhood-oriented activist site from Saint Louis. They are just getting rolling, but already you can see from their home page an effort to create a new hybrid of web forms that will help energize their urban community. That's community-minded genre-building for a new social context, yes?
And what in the world is a CyberCar?
"Development of the Genre Concept." Leen Breure, Information and Computing Sciences, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Version 1.0.1 – August, 2001 [0 & P]
For Bakhtin genres are not simply sets of rules and conventions, but ways of conceptualizing reality, forms of seeing and interpreting particular aspects of the world. They are connected with expectations about length and compositional structure. They are the fundamental molds in which we cast communication.
As a genre, then, blogging is a way of thinking, seeing, interpreting, and speaking, or perhaps more than one way. No doubt it arises from the needs and opportunities of our social circumstance; I wonder, therefore, whether the students who aren't much tempted by the genre find ways to duplicate the work bloggers do in some other genre, or perhaps they don't see a need for that kind of work or a value or hope in it. Breure says that "genre conventions signal a discourse community's norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology" -- perhaps the alienation in this case is not only from a particular genre, blogging, but from community life itself, where genre norms reside . . . at least the sort of life that supports a commitment to community.
Think, for example, of the large percentage of people who are said _not_ to support the listener-supported radio stations that they themselves listen to. It's a relatively passive medium, so while people might be willing to take a tote bag with station logo to the beach, they are often not willing to do much more than that. Listen, yes, perhaps contribute, but more likely not . . . That might be an example of individuals without strong community sense, so they have no place to develop community-minded genres. They (we) know how to receive, to watch or listen, but not to write in an active, community-shaping genre, and not surprisingly.
So we need to know more about community-minded genres -- how they work, how people work in them, how people learn them, and especially how people find their independence and commitment within them. In that spirit, I will be interested to see what happens at New Communities, a neighborhood-oriented activist site from Saint Louis. They are just getting rolling, but already you can see from their home page an effort to create a new hybrid of web forms that will help energize their urban community. That's community-minded genre-building for a new social context, yes?
And what in the world is a CyberCar?
"Development of the Genre Concept." Leen Breure, Information and Computing Sciences, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Version 1.0.1 – August, 2001 [0 & P]
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