What's on your mind: A new genre perhaps?

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Laurie McNeill (2011, p.314) argues that “genres at the intersection of print and digital culture” retain their traditional conventions and form, while taking advantage of the innovations – the “bells and whistles” (p.319), that the new medium allows. Kathleen Jamieson (1973, cited in McNeill, 2011, p.314) understands this through a ‘Darwinian’ lens, that is, genres evolve and adapt to take into account social and cultural changes in society, including new technologies. Thus, the new medium and its tools allow us to both create new online genres and reproduce traditional genre in new ways (Van Luyn, 2013).

Apart from the platform itself from which a ‘Facebook status’ is visible, let’s consider what else differentiates it as a specific type (genre) of computer-mediated communication, by looking at its features against John Frow’s (2013) four aspects of genre (cited by Van Luyn, 2013):

1. Formal features – use of short sentences, colloquial language, emoticons and internet slang to make a point (sometimes, lol). There are no rules about the proper use of grammar. 
2. Suppositions – people simply share their worldview, opinions, jokes, or snippets from their daily lives without explanation or background information, as we presuppose that our ‘friends’ have a frame of reference. 
3. Intertextuality – refers to previous posts, our lives, or other dominant discourse at the time (e.g. the election, news, sport). 
4. Readers – our posts are designed specifically for our Facebook ‘friends’, in order to achieve a certain effect (Van Luyn, 2013), usually in the form of a comment or a 'like'. 

Not only does the above show that the Facebook status can be considered a genre of its own, it also illustrates how genre shapes both how we produce cultural products and how we understand it (Van Luyn, 2013). 

References

McNeill, L. (2011). ‘Diary 2.0? A genre moves from page to screen.’ C. Rowe & E. Wyss (Eds.). Language and new media. (pp.313 – 325). Cresskill: Hampton Press Inc.

Van Luyn, A. (2013).  BA1002: Our Space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, Lecture 6: Genre. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

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