Page 97 - Literacy in the New Media Age

86 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

the centrality of text is essential and its consequences are far-reaching. It
challenges ingrained, common-sense theories of how we make and communicate
meanings. It insists that language-use is one kind of social action among others,
and that texts are the result of these social actions. This provides the relevant
frame in which to pose the question of genre: within a broad framework of text
as the result of constant making (in writing or speaking) and remaking (in
reading or hearing) of accounts of the place of writers and readers in the world,
providing us with the sense of who we think we are.
Genre is a category that orients attention to the social world. To employ it is to
accept that language-use is one kind of social action, shaped by social structures
and habituated practices of greater or lesser stability and persistence. In social
action, the text-maker shapes language into text-as-genre. But ‘text’ is a material
entity, drawing on the resources of the mode of writing to realise the significant
features of the social environment in which texts were made, shaped and
organised. In this manner, texts realise the significant features of the
environment in which they were formed. Above all, these include the
interrelations of the social actors involved in the social event of which the text
production is one part and the dissemination of the text another. Some social
events, rituals of state or religion for instance, have great stability; after all, the
stability of the ritual signals and guarantees the stability of the institution. In as
much as the emphasis in research has been on genres of power, it has inevitably
also been on genres of greater stability, and this, somewhat inadvertently, has led
to an emphasis, in theory, on the stability, even the fixity, of genre as a category.
Some social events have relatively little stability. The stability or otherwise of
the social situation of which the genre is the textual trace leads to the greater or
lesser stability of genres themselves. It may be, as a general rule, that public
events have greater stability than private events, so that public genres would be
both more stable and more subject to control.
Take job interviews as an example. When I was interviewed for my first (very
junior) job in a university in England in 1966, the interviewing panel consisted
of at least ten people. The arrangement of the room was highly formal, with the
panel ranged on one side of the room and myself opposite the panel, at some
distance. That is a very unlikely scenario now. The panel would be smaller, the
arrangement more ‘friendly’, and the formality much lessened. That change is
inevitably realised in the genre of job interview. Job interviews are now closer to
‘conversations’ than to ‘interrogations’ as they were then. In periods of great
social flux, the degree of dynamism, the rate of change, can lead to a sense that
there is in fact no such stability to social-textual forms.
The present period is one in which, as I said earlier, the formerly stable
framings in all sorts of significant areas are weakening or have already
disappeared. This leads on the one hand to rejection of the notion of genre as not
conforming to how things are, and to an attempt therefore to reimpose social
control at the level of text. On the other hand it leads to an emphasis on
blending, and on hybridisation – and to insistence that there are no longer any