Reading 4 - Genre: Textual meaning, producers and audiences

In this week’s lecture and related reading, we covered the topic of Genre and its textual meaning. Genre is the French word for “kind, category or type” (Long & Wall (2012) p.72) and it helps producers and audience distinguish the difference between two products. Genre allows us as a media producers or audience to pick out different characteristics or of a media product category them into specific groups. This is generally referred to as codes and conventions of a media product. Taking for example a horror film, the codes and conventions that would help an audience to distinguish the different between a horror film to other genres would be darker rooms, tense music, screaming, blood, zombies, vampires etc. “Any generic media text is both similar to and different from all other of its type” (Long & Wall (2012) p.72), this refers to each media text having features which comply to the codes and conventions of a genre, however make them different to the rest, which in essence, refers to as a subgenre which is more specific.

In the lecture, the 3c’s is a subject which is touched upon and they consist of Codes, conventions and context.  Codes are referred to as a system of signs which create meaning, these are broken down into three kinds of signs, technical, symbolic and written. Technical refers to the way in which the equipment is used in terms of the lighting, framing and depth of field to add effect. Symbolic refers more to the way objects or settings are used and the body language or clothing of the character. As oppose to written codes which discusses the way headlines are laid out, captions are displayed and the language style in which the piece is written.

The reading I found was a journal article piece on Visual Digital Culture: Surface play and spectacle in new media genres by Andrew Darley.  In this journal article, Andrew discusses video games and goes through the history of them. He discusses the visual element of the early arcade games and how many of the games have a similar layout with most of the games having a “flat geometric figures of dots or vectors lines, action which took place against a flat two dimensional background” (Darley (2000) p.26).    

Reference:

P.Long & T.Wall (2012). Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. 

Andrew Darley. (2000). Visual Digital Culture. Surface play and spectacle in new media genres. 1 (1), Routledge.