{"title":"Introduction to the special issue Genre After Media","authors":"Lauren Berliner, J. Cohn","doi":"10.1177/15274764231171061","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"A number of “thought-pieces” have recently come out proclaiming with glee that genre, as we know it, is dead; that it has been put out of its misery by algorithmic recommendations, search engines, and a rapidly transforming entertainment industry (de Pontent 2022; Battan 2019; Cooperman 2021; Leneghan 2020; Petrusich 2021). They present genre as the hard barriers that make entertainment boring and suggest that there is a utopian potential in breaking them down. In response, we collectively argue that genre is not only alive and well but is indeed one of the more thought-provoking aspects of contemporary media and media studies, and worthy of continued study. During a period when you can watch television in a theater, see theatrical performances on Zoom, screen a big-budget feature film on your phone, and play a game on Netflix, questions around the relationship between medium and genre have rarely if ever been more salient or more fascinating. Media specificity, the question of what makes one medium distinct from others and what they are uniquely adept at expressing, becomes significantly more complex when exhibitors appear agnostic about how exactly content is shown and experienced. While medium may be the dominant way in which humanities scholars tend to define their fields and objects of study, the essays collected here point to the continuing relevance of genre across both the entertainment industry and the academy. Indeed, the entertainment industry has increasingly turned to genre distinctions to help them to organize their collections and appeal to users. Netflix and most other streaming services go into extreme specifics in their genre categories but hardly focus at all on what medium their content might consist of (a movie?, TV?, or Video game?). And as medium becomes a less salient category, it begins to look more like genre with flexible definitions and squishy boundaries rather than exact specifications. For instance, what exactly is television anymore? And when we call something a film, are we referring to its medium, its genre, both, or neither? Genre clearly still matters to audiences and industries; generic trains and intertextual","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"25 1","pages":"479 - 487"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Television & New Media","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764231171061","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
A number of “thought-pieces” have recently come out proclaiming with glee that genre, as we know it, is dead; that it has been put out of its misery by algorithmic recommendations, search engines, and a rapidly transforming entertainment industry (de Pontent 2022; Battan 2019; Cooperman 2021; Leneghan 2020; Petrusich 2021). They present genre as the hard barriers that make entertainment boring and suggest that there is a utopian potential in breaking them down. In response, we collectively argue that genre is not only alive and well but is indeed one of the more thought-provoking aspects of contemporary media and media studies, and worthy of continued study. During a period when you can watch television in a theater, see theatrical performances on Zoom, screen a big-budget feature film on your phone, and play a game on Netflix, questions around the relationship between medium and genre have rarely if ever been more salient or more fascinating. Media specificity, the question of what makes one medium distinct from others and what they are uniquely adept at expressing, becomes significantly more complex when exhibitors appear agnostic about how exactly content is shown and experienced. While medium may be the dominant way in which humanities scholars tend to define their fields and objects of study, the essays collected here point to the continuing relevance of genre across both the entertainment industry and the academy. Indeed, the entertainment industry has increasingly turned to genre distinctions to help them to organize their collections and appeal to users. Netflix and most other streaming services go into extreme specifics in their genre categories but hardly focus at all on what medium their content might consist of (a movie?, TV?, or Video game?). And as medium becomes a less salient category, it begins to look more like genre with flexible definitions and squishy boundaries rather than exact specifications. For instance, what exactly is television anymore? And when we call something a film, are we referring to its medium, its genre, both, or neither? Genre clearly still matters to audiences and industries; generic trains and intertextual
期刊介绍:
Television & New Media explores the field of television studies, focusing on audience ethnography, public policy, political economy, cultural history, and textual analysis. Special topics covered include digitalization, active audiences, cable and satellite issues, pedagogy, interdisciplinary matters, and globalization, as well as race, gender, and class issues.