Bridge to Genre: Spanning Technological Change

How can new media bring out new genres? Taking a historical perspective, the author suggests that what is taken to be a new genre may in fact not be a new genre but an application of a new technology. Three phases (mid-19th-century photography; blogs; online news comment) show similar characteristics: the new technology is so widespread in its uptake that it seems to be a “mania” or “craze” beyond recognizable motivation; its uses are mixed and hard to classify; the period of unruly mixtures then gives way to orderly differentiation—to, that is, genres. These uses of new media, then, are not genres but “bridges to genre.” Such bridges are more like what Bakhtin called “primary genres” than the “secondary genres” usually recognized by rhetorical theory.