Notes for journalism students on Thems and theories issues in communication

1. Media Genres &Text
GAYATHRI. S
MCJ CALICUT
UNIVERSITY

2. Introduction
 In general use, the term ‘genre’ simply, means a kind or type and
it is often loosely applied to any distinctive category of cultural
product.
 The genre may be considered as a practical device for helping
any mass medium to produce consistently and efficiently and to
relate its production to the expectations of its audiences.
 Since it helps individual media users to plan their choices, it can
also be considered as a mechanism for ordering the relations
between producers and consumers.

3. A typology of genres
 Berger suggests that all television output can be classified according to four basic types,
produced by two dimensions: degree of emotionality and degree of objectivity.
 . Contests are programmes with competition involving real players, including game shows.
Quizzes and sports. They are both real and emotionally involving
 . Actualities include all news, documentary and reality programming. They are objective and
unemotional in principle.
 . Persuasions are low on both dimensions and reflect an intention by the sender to persuade,
especially by advertising or some of advocacy or propaganda.
 . Dramas cover almost all fictional storytelling and wide range of genres.

4. Genre and the internet
 Internet is a multimedia platform providing a vehicle for all existing genres.
Secondly, certain in forms and formats at least have already developed on the
basis of the special features of the Internet.
 These include various forms of bulletin board, forum, social networking sites,
different kinds of blog and many types of selling and buying sites and the
search engine.
 Many of the examples that could be named, although with some uncertainty
about whether or not they are really genres, do confirm to several features of
the concept, as given above.

5. The News Genre
 The newspaper is arguably, the archetype as well as the prototype of all modern
mass media and ‘news ‘is the central ingredient of the newspaper.
 To some extent, radio and television were modelled on the newspaper, with
regular news as their chief anchor point.
 News merits special attention in a discussion of media content just because it is
one of the few original contributions by the mass media to the range of cultural
form of expression.
 It is also the core activity according to which a large part of the journalistic
occupation defines itself.

6. News as Narrative
 Text as narratives has long been an object of study, and the narrative concept
has proved useful in understanding variety of media contents
 Basic narrative forms span a wide range of types, including advertisements
and news stories as well as the more obvious candidates of drama and fiction.
 In one way or another, most media content tells stories which take rather
patterned and predictable forms. The main function of narrative is to help
make sense of report of experience.
 It does this in two main ways: by linking actions and events of logical,
sequential or casual way; and by providing the elements of people and places
that have a fixed and recognizable character.

7. Television Violence
 One category of media content that has been studied as
intensively and as long as news is that of television
programming containing violence. Of course, this is not a
genre as such since violence can appear in virtually all
television genres
 However, there is a smaller category of television
programming which is identifiable by its heavy reliance on
violence for its audience appeal.

8. The Cultural Text and Its Meaning
 A new form of discourse concerning media texts has
emerged, especially with the rise of cultural studies and its
convergence on an existing tradition of mass communication
research.
 The origins of cultural studies are somewhat mixed, including
traditional literacy and linguistic analysis of texts, semiology
and Marxist theory.
 A convincing effort has been made by Fiske (1987) to bring
much disparate theory together, especially for the purpose of
analysing and understanding popular culture.

9. The concept of text
 The term ‘text’ has been mainly used in two basic sense. One
refers very generally to the physical message itself- the
printed documents, film, television programme or musical
score, as noted above.
 An alternative usage, recommended by Fiske, is to reserve
the term ‘text’ for the meaningful outcome of the encounter
between content and reader. For instance, a television
programme ‘becomes a text at the moment of reading that
is when its capable of provoking’.

10. Open versus closed texts
 In the particular discourse about media content under
discussion, the content may be considered to be more or
less ‘open’ or ‘closed’ in its meanings.
 According to Eco, an open text is one whose discourse does
not try to constrain the reader to one particular meaning or
interpretation.
 Different kinds and actual examples of media text can be
differentiated according to their degree of openness.

11. Seriality
 There has been a revival of interests in narrative theory, especially as a result
of the great attention given to drama, serials and series in media studies.
 The topic of seriality now has a place in narrative theory.
 Narrative theory itself owes much to the work of Propp (1968), who
uncovered the basic similarity of narrative structure in Russian folk tales.
 Modern popular media fiction also testifies to the high degree of constancy
and similarity of a basic plot.

12. Realism
 Narrative often depends on assumptions about realism and
helps to reinforce a sense of reality, by invoking the logic,
normality and predictability of human behaviour.
 The conventions of realistic fiction were established by the
early forms of the novel, although they were preceded by
realism in other arts.
 On the one hand, realism of media depends on a certain
attitude that what is portrayed is true to life, if not reality true
in the sense of having actually occurred

13. Gendered media texts
 The concept of an inscribed or interpellated reader can be used to
analyse the audience image sought by particular media, in terms of class,
cultural taste, age or lifestyle.
 Many kinds of media content, following the same line of argument are
differentially gendered.
 They have a built- in bias towards the supposed characteristics of one or
other gender, presumably for reason of appealing to a chosen audience,
or simply because many language codes are innately gendered.

14. The cultural text approaches
 Texts are jointly produced with their readers.
 Texts are differentially encoded.
 Texts are ‘polysemic’, i.e. have many potential meanings.
 Texts are related to other texts.
 Texts employ different narrative forms.
 Texts are gendered.

15. Conclusion
 Generalization about the content of mass media has become
progressively more difficult as the media have expanded and
diversified and multimedia forms have come to predominate.
 Established genres have multiplied and mutated, casting doubt on
genre analysis as a stable framework for describing media output.
 Our capacity to even of conventional media, let alone of the
internet and the other new forms of delivery.

16. Thank you