Genre System: Effects of Technology on the Relationships between Genres

Genre System: Effects of Technology on the Relationships between Genres Slide 1 Hello, my name is Stephen Carradini, and I’m from the CRDM program at North Carolina State University. Today I’m going to talk about how technology affects the relationships between genres in a genre assemblage. Slide 2 The effects of technology, particularly Internet-connected technology, on communication have been discussed under many concept names, such as: Slide 3 The concept of “Distributed Work” in Technical Communication, Slide 4 Multimodal Communication in Rhetoric and Composition, Slide 5 and Emerging Genres and Slide 6 Genre Change in Rhetorical Genre Studies. However, it has been hard to isolate the effects of technology on genres of communication amid the shifting professional, personal, cultural and social norms associated with the uptake of technology. Genre has long been studied as a social phenomenon, but I argue that technology imposes more on the social development of new communication techniques and genre use than we have previously allowed. We know that technology causes changes to how we communicate, but identifying what the technology mandates and what humans innovate in response to these technological realities has been difficult to separate. This lack of clarity stymies both speculative prognostication and pragmatic preparation for future realities. It is hard to teach what to expect when we do not know the ways that technology can affect a communication system. This has been further complicated by the short history of the internet-connected communication device in comparison to the longevity of other communication modes. But as cell phone adoption reaches saturation (as evidenced by Apple’s recent first-ever drop in iPhone sales quarter over quarter) and college freshmen are reaching the university having never known a time before the Internet, we are at a moment where we can start to begin doing more historical comparison of our stabilizing recent historical moment with past eras of communication. Doing these historical comparisons can help us understand the effects of new technology on communication, and help scholars, professionals, and students prepare for the next big shifts in technology professionally, pedagogically, and personally. Slide 7 In this talk, I will investigate the following question: What communication changes can be attributed to technology directly and not to shifting rhetorical, professional, and cultural norms surrounding the uptake of technology? Slide 8 This study investigated the genre system surrounding independent rock concerts. Independent musicians are a particularly relevant group to study in relation to technology change, as the music industry was the canary in the coal mine for Web 2.0 with the formation of Napster in 1999. The music industry’s profits plummeted in Napster’s wake, causing dramatic sea changes for the industry. Before Napster and the Internet, the genre system surrounding booking and promoting an independent rock concert was composed of slow, tedious work in a difficult information environment. After the Internet was popularized and integrated into the professional lives of musicians, their work was much faster, but it was done in a saturated information environment. The message and overall goals of the genre system surrounding independent rock concerts did not change: bands still wanted to book shows, they booked them with largely the same people, and they needed to promote the shows to their audience. But technology had a distinct effect in changing the genres used to do these tasks. Slide 9 Rhetorical Genre Studies began by studying the genre and expanded to studying how genres relate to each other. Spinuzzi (2004) lists four ways that genres can relate to each other (which he deems assemblages): sets, networks, ecologies, and systems. In this presentation, I will discuss genre systems. Bazerman suggests that a system is an assemblage where “interrelated genres … interact with each other in specific settings. Only a limited range of genres may appropriately follow upon one another in particular settings, because the success conditions of the actions of each require various states of affairs to exist” (Bazerman, 1994, pp. 97-98). The success of one is the precondition for the next. While booking shows could be studied in relation to many different assemblages, I found the system most productive in this context. Slide 10 A little background on independent music business: Concert venues make money by selling tickets and concessions to concerts. Bands get money when the venue gets money; the venue agrees to pay bands a certain amount based on expectations of how many people the band can bring in. Thus, it’s in the band’s best interest to get as many people to come to the show to get paid well, and in the venue’s best interest to pick bands that will get people to come so that they can get profit. If a band fails to bring people to the show, it’s bad for both parties, but the venue can book other bands to try to make up for this failure. Since there are many bands willing and able to take the spot of a band that didn’t bring money in to the venue, bands are incentivized to promote the show as much as possible and in as many ways as possible. Slide 11 In other words, drawing on Caves’ (2000) economic principles of arts, bands for these concerts are in “infinite supply,” but they are not all “A list” bands that can ensure a good audience for the venue. However, the venue has limited ways to know who is A list and who is not without actually having them in for a show. To this end, booking is fraught with tension for both parties in the transaction. Slide 12 To begin my study of how technology affected the genre system surrounding independent musicians’ concert booking and promoting practices, I interviewed 18 musicians about their business genre use that I found via a snowball respondent selection process, starting with musicians I knew in a professional capacity as an arts journalist. Once their interviews were transcribed, I coded them using process coding and in vivo coding. Process coding (looking for words ending in –ing) allowed me to find activities that musicians were engaged in. In vivo coding allowed me to find genre names associated with these activities (Saldaña, 2009). Once I had lists of both, I reduced my data by seeking out the activities found most often in the transcripts. Every one of the 18 musicians mentioned playing shows in some regard, establishing it as an important part of the independent musicians’ business activities. One interview respondent stated directly, “Playing shows is the main way that independent artists make money.” I then sought out the genres that co-occurred with the activities surrounded playing shows: booking and promoting. Once I had this list of genres surrounding these activities, I sought out historical comparison by looking for activities and genres in popular historical texts and relevant sections of interviews from the 18 interviews about pre-Internet booking and promotion of shows. Slide 13 After this analysis was complete, I concluded that the technologies of the print era were very time-consuming and therefore difficult to use effectively. The phone booths, landline phones, and posters of the print era were difficult to deploy effectively. The Internet era largely replaced phone booths, landlines, and posters as primary communication methods, replacing them with e-mail, cell phones, and social media. These technologies are easy to use, do not take a lot of time, and are relatively low-cost after the startup fees of the hardware itself. However, this is true for a very large number of people: where a small number of dedicated musicians braved the difficulties of pre-Internet technology and had a measure of success, a large number of musicians are now available, with little startup cost or time expended, do the same types of promotion. This causes a saturated market, which makes booking and promotion difficult in a different way than before. Slide 14 This is the genre system that I found related to booking and promoting an independent rock show in the pre-2000 era. It is a small system that does not include very many genres. It is centered around the bottle neck of the phone call. Slide 15 This is the genre system that takes place currently. There are a lot more genres, as the system has expanded significantly in all areas leading up to people attending the show. This expansion of genres is directly related to the development of the Internet-connected communication device and the diminishing of the landline-based phone. I will explain these genre systems in more detail now. Slide 16 The landline phone was the critical technology of the pre-Internet era genre system. Almost extinct today, the pay phone was one of the only ways that bands could connect with people in far-flung areas. One interview respondent I call Jeff acknowledged that it was so important that bands developed ways to game the system, using metal slugs and collect calls to save themselves money on communication with other bands and venues while on the road. Slide 17 But before musicians could call anyone, they needed to find where they were going to play. Musicians seeking a show out of town would have a very small number of ways to learn about other venues: one was national magazine classifieds. One respondent noted, “So there were publications. One was called ‘Book Your Own Fucking Life’ and I think it was from the Maximum Rock 'n' Roll and Punk Planet publishers, like a side thing. But it would list by state and city venues, like veggie restaurants, Indie record stores, places to crash. And inevitably, it was out-of-date because all of these venues were kind of seat-of-the-pants kind of things.” “So, of the, let’s say, 100 contacts … maybe 50 were still viable. And if you call all of those, maybe you got five responses and then maybe a show out of that. So it was a lot of … phone work.” Slide 18 Once the venue agreed to book the show, a poster was made by the band, mailed to the venue (or the local band), and posted around town. Jeff noted of the first thing that his bands would do in town was check on this: “We’d go, try to find the local Indie record stores, see if there were flyers up. If there weren’t flyers up, we would go to Kinko’s and make a bunch of flyers. Plaster the downtown.” Word of mouth was also expected from any local bands that were on the show. As a result, people would attend the show, the venue would make money, and the band would make money. Communication was expensive and slow. Information would not get updated frequently, leaving bands with lots of bad information. Jeff noted that “All of these venues were kind of seat-of-the-pants kind of things.” This was highly inefficient and extremely difficult work with land line phones. But, as Jeff said technologies changed and made the conditions of working easier in some ways. Slide 19 In the Internet era, communication is easy, fast, and cheap compared to the time-consuming landline phone. Jeff noted of booking, “Once email came into it, it became a lot easier, a bit cheaper. You didn’t have to make long distance calls all the time. Cell phones made it cheaper too eventually.” Bands look up venues online and e-mail them for shows. It does not take a chain of contacts and many phone attempts. It takes, in some cases, seconds. One woman, Melissa, explained the booking process as: “We would just email people, like email venue owners and say, “Hey, are you guys looking for artists to play this night? Like Melissa is available.” And sometimes they would say no, and sometimes they would say yes, and so that’s how it happened, and really just like inquiring about things.” However, the genres surrounding the promotion of the show have grown in number. This respondent, whom I’ll call Allen, notes that he employs multiple technologies and genres to promote a show. He said “I am really tactical about it. So it’s a mix of Facebook invite--like creating an event on Facebook. I’ll always get like a poster made or a flyer made, and I will make sure it’s good. And I will say, like, I am printing these, and if you come to the show you can have one … I will text people, like “Hey, I am playing in your neighborhood. Like it’s a Tuesday night, but what else are you doing?” Another respondent, Ella, noted that it was a weekly process of promotion for her. “So at the top of the week I’ll create art work for Instagram, I’ll just figure out what I need to do, what Facebook events I need to create to promote a show that’s several weeks away, stuff like that.” Genres like Facebook and Instagram are important for promotion. Old genres have not completely disappeared: the poster is still involved. But the phone isn’t used for calling anymore; it’s used for texting. His expectation isn’t that he won’t be able to reach anyone or have to rely on someone far-off to do the legwork for him: his expectation is that he will reach people multiple ways with his message. Slide 20 In addition to social media, musicians reported that reaching people by electronic newsletter was important. Respondent Mitch noted: “We’ve always really focused on our email list as a primary way to talk to the people who care about our band.” It was noted as more personalized than social media but less personalized (and less time consuming) than texting people individually. The ability to promote to hundreds of people at once in a semi-personalized way is a technological affordance that didn’t exist in the pre-Internet era. One respondent, Zack, said that e-mail helped solved the main problem of promotion: “The email aspect, that seems to be pretty good as far as getting people to come out...” to the shows. Slide 21 However, the saturation of information in the Internet era makes the fact that people can be reached easily not as powerful as it might be. Bands reported not having perfect success even though it was easier to contact venues for gigs: “A lot of it, as you can imagine or know, is a lot of sending emails and not getting responses. I compose kind of a standard message and I send it out to each [venue] and kind of spend an hour to two hours per city doing that.” Even though the response rate is low, the time spent is significantly less than the hours explained by Jeff on the phone. This respondent, Jim, reports that he doesn’t know how to get people to commit to going to a show of a band that they don’t already know and love in the Internet era. “If a band is coming through my town and I am here, and they do like a Facebook ad or whatever, it’s very hard even if you are a musician who wants to go out and support music to see something like that. Like a cold call, you know? Like just a band you’ve never heard of. There is no recommendation for it. … And so I’m not exactly sure the best way to bridge that gap when you are at such a small scale.” This is a paradox: there are many, many more ways to get information out, but this creates a difficulty for getting people to shows, not an ease. The technology that is so easy to use and simplifies some features of booking a show makes getting a show and promoting the show harder. This does not have to do with the message involved: the promotional message of “come to the show” remains unchanged through both eras. However, the technology upon which that message is conveyed has changed dramatically, making certain parts of the process more difficult and other parts easier. This is an isolatable change that a shift in technology caused: a message is the same, but the genres that the message must be conveyed upon and the success with which those genres’ messages are conveyed have changed dramatically due to changes in technology. The disappearance of the pay phone and landline from the system and their replacement with Internet connected technologies that host e-mail and social media caused significant changes to the reception and uptake of the genre system. Slide 22 Technology has an effect on how genre systems work. In this research, a shift in technology from landline to internet expanded the genre system that surrounded playing shows. In addition to expanding the genre system, the change of technology caused different parts of the genre system to function differently. The print era’s systems were slow and inefficient in booking and promoting. The Internet era’s systems were fast and allowed for quick booking inquiries. However, the saturated information market made possible by the Internet caused it to be that promoting a show once it had been booked was much more difficult. Technology both solved and created problems for musicians, altering the genre system in unexpected ways. The message remained the same throughout both technology environments for this genre system, but the ways that the message made it through various technologies and genres to users, and their expectations of what to do with the message when they received the message, were different due to the change of technology. Users in this system are struggling to respond to the shifts of the genre system because of technology. This points to a need for more understanding of how technology changes genres and genre systems, as the effects of technological change on the message that people want to send may be even greater than we expected. The intrusion of technological change on a genre system can be unexpectedly large. Thank you for your time. References Bazerman, C. (1994). Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 79-101). London / Bristol: Taylor & Francis. Caves, R. E. (2000). Creative industries: Contracts between art and commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saldaña, J. (2009). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Los Angeles: Sage. Spinuzzi, C. (2004). Four ways to investigage assemblages of texts: Genre sets, systems, repertoires, and ecologies. Paper presented at the SIGDOC '04, Memphis, TN. Paper retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1026560