Cinnabar and Alabaster

as van dijck points out, the problem with naming a genre "blog" is that there are many kinds of blogs--people blog in many different genres. (i'd never heard the specific term "lifelog" before--how 'bout the rest of you?) but people talk about them as if they are a genre, or a few genres ("lifelogs" vs. "academic blogs" vs. "poly" (multi-authored) blogs vs. ???)--a move that seems to make at least a little sense because they're clearly something other than the print-genres we're used to--so, the logic goes, they must therefore have a genre of their own.

i see the slippage there coming from two places:

1) new technology seems to easily lead to blurred distinctions between genre and medium--a blurring that would never occur in the standard print-genres of the technology we've gotten used to. one doesn't wonder whether a poem is still a poem or becomes prose if it's on parchment rather than notebook paper. it's possible to say that "blog" is the same thing--just a different kind of "page" on which any type of thing can be written.

in their 1997 "postings on a genre of e-mail," michael spooner and kathleen yancey* have the genre-vs.-medium debate about e-mail (the title is misleading; the designation begins and ends under debate, so they never agree that e-mail is a genre at all). the arguments they present will sound similar: e-mail is a way to convey information, but that information can appear in different forms--so it can be used for many different genres. BUT it also allows for, encourages, even demands textual practices that are different from what print media allow, so it creates (or allows the creation of?) (a) new genre(s). their point (that they can't answer the question?) is underscored by the format of the piece--appearing in a collection of scholarly essays, their contribution appears as an e-mail transcript, a print-out of a conversation going back and forth between correspondants, much like these postings turn into conversations in the comment sections. print genres don't do that. one person speaks. another person might speak later in a rebuttal, but both (many) voices don't appear to challenge and contradict each other. in e-mail, as in the blog (and here i'm getting to madeline's ideas), the audience speaks (strikes? i couldn't help it!) back.

2) genre means very different things in the literary tradition, where it's primarily spoken of as a form-based classifying appellation each particular work carries or a set a work belongs to, and in rhetoric & communication fields, where "genre theory" is theory about & the study of the purposes that drive, demand, and modify form. so while coming out of the literary tradition we might look at a blog to see what properties it has on its page, and compare those properties to the propertires of other pieces of writing on their pages, and from such observations decide what generic category to place it in (or that it needs a new one), a rhetorical genre scholar is more likely to look at what the blog does--what need it was created to fill, how it fills that need, what other ways of filling that need there might be--to answer questions about the uniqueness of that need. are blogs just another, comparable way of doing something old, or do they do something different and new?

*in bishop, wendy; hans ostrom, (eds.), genre and writing: issues, arguments, alternatives; portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook publishers. at comppile, search under "myka."

(x-posted to 711; see comments there)