Are online blogs representative of a new genre?

Online blogs have created a seemingly new genre in the world of communication. By genre, I mean a conceptual tool for research on writing, reading, and language in our current digital age (Heyd 2016). Georgakopoulou (2006: 552) describes digital genre as ‘orienting frameworks of conventionalised expectations and routine ways of speaking and (inter)acting in specific sites and for specific purposes.’ Therefore, in Swales’ (1990: 58) definition of a genre, which focuses on functionality, blogs are a genre in themselves. They have followed the process of remediation: ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’ (Bolter & Grusin 2000: 273). Hence, blogs are an example of a remediated hybrid genre as they incorporate both new and old media norms (Herring et al. 2005).

Blogs have the ability to create a relationship between their writer and their audience as they offer personal stories, opinions, and thoughts, all in the interest of entertaining the reader. Online blogs were first introduced into digital communication around 1997 and were called “weblogs”. In 1999 the estimated number of blogs was less than 50 and then by the end of 2000, it was estimated that there were thousands of blogs (Drenzer et al. 2007: 2). Vlogs (video blogs), photologs (photo blogs), and audiologs (audio blogs) are newer forms of blog that include different styles of media. The words have been formed by blending the type of media with the noun ‘blog’. As blogs have moved on and grown as a platform of communication, it has enabled many other varieties of blog to be created. Moreover, the opportunity to create inter-personality in blogs has made them become more attractive to individuals who write blogs to keep as a public diary. However, blogs are still being written by large corporations or institutions, using them as a marketing strategy to promote products or ideologies, for example. Due to blogs being used for many different functions, it makes it difficult to suggest that blogs represent a new genre themselves as there are multiple overlaps between functions and genres.

You could argue that online blogs are closely related to offline diaries due to many features they share. Some of these features include posts being added very frequently and that they appear in a ‘chronological order’ (Crystal 2006: 240). In this sense, it could be argued that blogs haven’t created a new genre as they share features with offline diaries. However, it is not possible for readers to interact with offline forms of communication. Moreover, offline diaries are not written with the intent of anyone other than the writer to read as they are of such a personal nature. Contrastingly, online blogs are written with the intention of a potentially large audience to read them. Writers are aware that strangers on the internet will read their blogs, and this may cause the writer to go into less, or more (depending on the writer’s confidence), depth about their personal beliefs or opinions when writing their online blogs. Taking the similarities and differences between diaries and blogs into account, it could be argued that, yes, online blogs have created a new genre because of remediation and the refashioning of ‘prior media forms’ (Bolter & Grusin 2000: 273).

There are three different forms of blog: ‘filters, personal journals, and notebooks’ Blood (2002), as cited in Herring et al. (2005: 4). She then goes on to distinguish the differences between these different forms of blog: filters are removed from the blogger (e.g. world news); personal journals contain things personal to the blogger (e.g. activities they have recently completed, or thoughts/feelings); and notebooks can contain external and personal events and ‘are distinguished by longer, focused essays.’ From Blood’s (2002) distinction between the forms of blog, it consolidates her feeling that blogs are “native” to the internet and have not been formed using offline genres. This supports the claim that online blogs represent a new genre. All in all, Herring et al. (2005: 10) conclude that blogs are a ‘hybrid of existing genres’ especially as they are a medium between web pages and computer mediated communication (CMC).

Figure 1: Online blogs on a continuum between ‘Standard Web Pages’ and ‘Asynchronous CMC’ (Herring et al. 2005: 10)

All things considered, the debate about whether online blogs have created a new genre is completely reliant on your personal perspective. The argument with the most supporting evidence is that online blogs are representative of a new genre as the merging of two (or more) previous forms of online and offline communication has enabled online blogs to stand independently in a genre category for themselves. Crystal (2006: 240-241) states that blogging is different to other forms of digital media because of the ‘dynamic interactivity required’ due to there being such a large possibility of author to reader connections.

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References

Blood, R. (2002). The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass. Mit Press

Crystal, D. 2006. New varieties. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Drezner, D.W. and Farrell, H., 2008. Introduction: Blogs, politics and power: a special issue of Public Choice. Public Choice, 134, pp.1-13.

Georgakopoulou, A. 2006 ‘Postscript: computer-mediated communication in sociolinguistics’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 548–557.

Herring, S.C., Scheidt, L.A., Wright, E. and Bonus, S. (2005). Weblogs as a bridging genre. Information Technology & People, 18(2), pp.142–171. doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/09593840510601513 

Heyd, T. 2016. Digital genres and processes of remediation. In A. Georgakopoulou & T. Spilioti (Eds.), The routledge handbook of language and digital communication. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 87-101.

Ratih, E. and Gusdian, R.I., 2018. Word formation processes in English new words of Oxford English dictionary (OED) online. Celtic: A Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching, Literature and Linguistics, 5(2), pp.24-35.

Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yao, M. Z. & Ling, R. 2020. “What Is Computer-Mediated Communication?” – An Introduction to the Special Issue. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Vol 25. Issue 1. Pp 4-8. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz027