Page 108 - Literacy in the New Media Age

A SOCIAL THEORY OF TEXT 97

Wollondilly Health Council

1 NO GROG at all in ambulances.
2 NO EATING at all in ambulances.
3 Ambulances must be cleaned by drivers when returned.
4 Ambulances for HEALTH business only – NOT FOR COMMUNITY
AND OTHER MEETINGS.
5 NO SHOPPING.
6 NO KANGAROO HUNTING.
7 Only for sick ones. – Not too many family. – Hospital and Health
business only.
8 No private use by staff on weekends, except when used for clinic
business.
9 One car for sorry business only.
10 Only CLOSE family to go with patients to town. Not big mobs of the
one family. (Ambulance drivers need to be strong.)
11 Not more than eleven (11) passengers.

SIGNED: [10 signatories]
MEMBERS OF THE HEALTH COUNCIL
(Northern Territory, Australia, 1992)

There are similarities to the preceding two sets of rules; clearly these are rules. I
am so unfamiliar with the social lives of the people involved here that I cannot
say, with the relative confidence that I expressed before that the ordering of the
rules either is or is not significant. In other words, one has to be at least relatively
inward with a social group and its lived day-to-day experience to understand
such a thing – whether at the social level or at the generic. There is only one passive
here, but there is an overwhelming use of negation. Prohibition on action has to
be made explicit. That much one can say from the form of the genre. It is a
society in which these things cannot be taken for granted.
The point that I wish to make is that there is an entire link and an extremely
close link between the social organisation and the social relations of social actors
involved in the making and receiving or interpretation of texts, and the
realisational forms of the texts. It is the social givens which shape the generic
form of the text. Genre is a response to the social givens. This is clear enough,
and counters any assumptions about the complete stability, or the generality, of
genres. At the same time it does not undermine or negate the point of
recognisability. The question that arises is, where are the recognisable
similarities, and the recognisable differences, and what do they reveal – at the
level of the meaning of genre about the social organisation of this group and of
its actions? At the level of the forms of genre, we can see that variability within
recognisability is not an issue at all.