Originally published as Information Technology & People Volume 18 Number 2, 2005
*Limited Stock*
ISBN: 1 84544 158 3
Guest edited by: Kevin Crowston & Barbra Kwasnik, Syracuse University, USA.
The study of genres – the fusion of content, purpose and form of communicative actions – stretches back hundreds of years to the beginnings of self-reflective human communication.
Greek philosophers and orators recognized that the content of the message is not always its most important aspect; rather, the delivery, the context, and the rhetorical structure all play complementary roles in the subtle but profound act of one human being transferring information to another and thereby creating meaning from that transfer. As well, we have long had an awareness that the concept of genre is not only critical to communication, but, indeed, worthy of study in its own right. Because a “genre” is not any one thing, but rather an intersection of several phenomena in a context of use, its study has spanned many disciplines and areas of praxis, from the arts to metadata schemes.
In this Special Issue, four papers are presented that address fundamental questions about genre, and that extend the study of genres to the environment of the World-Wide Web.
Contents:
Temporal coordination through communication: using genres in a virtual start-up organization
In this paper, it is found that members of a small start-up organization temporally coordinated their dispersed activities through everyday communicative practices, thus accomplishing both the distributed development of a software system and the creation of a robust virtual team.
Digital genres: a challenge to traditional genre theory
The purpose of this paper is to account for the genre characteristics of non-linear, multi-modal, web-mediated documents. It involves a two-dimensional view on genres that allows one to account for the fact that digital genres act not only as text but also as medium.
Weblogs as a bridging genre
This article aims to describe systematically the characteristics of weblogs (blogs) – frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence and which are the latest genre of internet communication to attain widespread popularity.
Online newspapers in Scandinavia: A longitudinal study of genre change and interdependency
This article examines the evolution of the online newspaper genre in Scandinavia to provide an understanding of the institutional context in which online newspapers initially were produced and modified over time.
About Information Technology & People
As information technology becomes ever more sophisticated, complex and pervasive, its encounter with organizational structures and practices continues to deepen in importance, to the organizations themselves, to the people who comprise them, and to the societies in which this encounter is embedded.
Information Technology & People has been a pioneer in exploring this phenomenon since 1982. It remains at the leading edge of research that discerns not only the interrelationship of IT and the organization, but new methods and theories for perceiving and understanding this relationship.
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