Entry 4 - Genre

In this week’s set reading I have been able to learn more about genre and narrative, picking up on the factors that bring together different media products.

The use of genres 'are meaningful to both producers and consumers' (Long, 2012: 72). This is because genre as a whole helps us as a viewer to pick things we like, such as a type of film (Action/Comedy) or even the type of music we like (Pop/Rock). This all comes down to ‘sets of codes and conventions’ (Long, 2012: 72) used over and over again. In terms of photography, this could mean using a certain model which in most cases shows a woman to be photographed, the same lighting or even the same camera settings. All of these things will then draw is in time and time again.

The narrative is also important, not because it allows the producers to see what we like but because it ‘encourages us to read specific parts of the text’ (Long, 2012: 82) such as the storyline but it’s not only this. It becomes a ‘method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events’ (Labov, 2013: ). For instance when watching a film with a hero, villain and princess you automatically assume the hero will slay the villain and rescue the princess, this all comes down to the fact ‘we are accustomed to the film style’ (Long, 2012: 89) but also because it has become so natural to us. This isn’t something that only one person has touched on, the theorist Vladimir Propp also created a theory that suggested there were many of the same features in ‘folk tales’.

However, it’s not just film that follows these patterns. Even though it might not be noticeable, we as an audience create our own story to go alongside a photograph we might see. This could come from us posing questions or even just talking about what can be seen. An example of this is when I first seen Peter Kennard’s Tony Blair selfie (Phillips, 2013). At first look I thought it aimed to show peoples thoughts surrounding the war, however this wasn’t the case as it showed him to be in an oil field following an Anti-war campaign done by the artist, however this was able to show me how you build up your own ideas.

Bibliography

Long, P and Wall, T (2012) Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context (2nd Edition), London: Pearson.

Phillips, K., 2013. New Statesman. [Online]
Available at: http://www.newstatesman.com/art-and-design/2013/10/response-peter-kennard-and-cat-phillips-censorship-flourishing-our-public-spa
[Accessed 24 March 2015]

Andrews, M., Squire, C., & Tamboukou, M. (Eds.). (2013). Doing narrative research. Sage.