Identifying Potential Genres of Viral Videos

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Recommended: Approaches to genre

Can a medium be a genre? If we casually substitute genre for more general synonyms like category, class, or group, then the answer is “yes,” as demonstrated by the information architecture of online super-retailers like Amazon.com. Amazon subdivides its massive inventory first by medium, like “Books” or “Movies,” before incrementally working toward a finer degree of granularity. Taking books as our example medium, we can navigate by sub-genres to find a title in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Adventure. But this understanding of genre-as-synonym largely ignores the more formal identification process performed within the established field of genre studies. Frow (2005) provides several structural dimensions to use when identifying genre, which include considerations of formal features, thematic structure and content, physical setting, and situation of address. For longer-established genres, like the sci-fi adventure book, say, we could easily recognize several of these dimensions and codify common elements together into a genre. However, do these dimensions provide the same ease of identification for emerging classifications of digital media, like the viral video?

Popular misconceptions, especially online, are often quick to describe any collection of related artifacts as a “genre,” and the discourse of Internet phenomena appears to be no different. As articlecity.com contributor John Heritage attempts to explain:

Viral video is hard to define, but it is quickly becoming its own genre. I had a college professor once, in an attempt to define poetry, say this: ‘Poetry is like pornography. It’s tough to define, but you know it when you see it.’ Substitute ‘Viral Video’ for ‘Poetry’ and you have a definition o...

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...ipt mentioned in Pierce, D. (Feb 9, 2010). Shock and awe: Viral news is good news. Wired.com. Retrieved February 9, 2010, from http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/shock-and-awe-viral-news-is-good-news/

Burgess, J. (2008). “All your Chocolate Rain are belong to us?' Viral video, YouTube and the dynamics of participatory culture. In G. Lovink and S. Niederer, (Eds.) Video vortex reader: Responses to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, pp. 101-109.

Frow, J. (2005). Genre. London: Routledge (New Critical Idiom series).

Heritage, J. (2009). Viral video quickly becoming its own genre. Articlecity.com. Retrieved February 5, 2010, from http://www.articlecity.com/articles/humor/article_315.shtml

Jenkins, H. (2009, February 11). If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead. Message posted to http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html

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