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Media Criticism Fall2006 Session11

Most of class was spent in a paper improvement exercise in which those who arrived at class with a paper in hand read it to one or two other classmates. Several kinds of feedback were created. A final draft of short paper 1, incorporating your improvements, is due on Monday.

Genre Theory (continued)

• 6. The Ecological approach
  • Genre emerges in the intersection of three "spheres of invention"
    1. Practices
       • The patterns of use associated with a medium
       • Often the focus of the Aesthetic and Ritual approaches
    2. Effects
       • The effects that the content within a medium has on participants in the medium
       • Often the focus of the Ideological Approach
    3. Uses
       • A critical, but often ignored, element of genre
         • But the focus of the Theoretical Approaches of Aristotle and Frye
           • Comedy and Tragedy are explained in terms of purpose
           • Tragedy stirs fear and awe and results in "catharsis"
           • Comedy stirs amusement and results in happiness
         • And an important part of the Russian Formalist approach
           • Propp's "functions" reflect this orientation
  • Uses, Effects, and Practices influence each other in a circular manner, as depicted in the "cycle of genre":

• Bottom line, we use media, including television and radio, for particular purposes
  • Genre is an emergent expression of such use
  • Or, more appropriately, the intersection of the uses of:
    • Creators
    • Consumers
    • Producers
    • Directors
    • Distributors
    • Advertisers
    • Critics
    • And other participants in and "victims of" media
• One cannot use a medium for any purpose without having effects
  • In terms of use
    • Consumers, content providers, advertisers, and critics all have different purposes
  • In terms of effects
    • All these groups and the wider community are affected by any use of a medium
    • Some effects will be considered good by a subset of participants
    • Some of those effects will be considered bad
    • The same effect may be considered good in one community and bad in another
• Practices emerge as a way of controlling effects
  • Preserving and optimizing the "good" effects
    • The conventions of various genres
  • Controlling the "bad" effects
    • Viewing habits
    • Parental controls
    • Informal rules of behavior
    • Laws, regulation, and censorship
• Examples
  • Romance Novels
  • Telemarketing
  • Spam
  • Reality Shows
• Genre theory cannot and should not deny the importance of uniqueness
  • All interesting texts have considerable unique content
  • New genres can't happen without experimentation
  • Genre theory simply note patterns that recur
    • Because they work
    • In satisfying a set of needs
    • And optimizing a medium to a particular use
  • Television creates so much content, it may be useful to think of every series as a "micro-genre"