Assignment 10 (Genre 2)
It might help us to better understand two aspects of genre theory – the notion that genres “stabilize” experience and that they are forms of “situated cognition” – by analyzing real-world examples using those concepts.
For this assignment, choose a social media platform and first chart out the various kinds of social actions, i.e. genres, that one can write in to interact on the platform. What are the typified rules associated with the platform? How do the textual/graphical features surrounding the genre, such as the prompt, or how writing is displayed, affect the user’s experience of the genre? How have the typified rules associated with the genre changed over the years? Try to bring your answers to these questions back to the notions of “stability” and “situated cognition” from the chapter. After describing your social media genre, write a paragraph relating the concrete example back to these terms from the chapter. Please find 3-5 examples of the genre.
