[Air-L] Are 'categories' the same as 'genres'?

[Ravindra N. Mohabeer]

Hello,

Forgive me if this has been covered previously but a thought occurred to me just now as I prepped for my night course (yuck!) called "Understanding Television." 

I wondered how students today make sense of the notion of 'genre' and then I thought, well since most of them don't watch TV over the air (or cable or satellite) and get TV shows online (a whole other issue as to whether or not that's the same as watching TV), it makes sense to think of it in digital terms.

So then I got to thinking, how do genres get represented on the Internet - through database categories used for indexing? Through site producers file structures? Through tagging? If so, how do we deal with the semantic arbitrariness of tagging between individual users?

Even if categories are what can be considered genres today, do the different types of content that appear on various manifestations of the Internet fall into the same categories as other 'traditional media'? What are the genres in the age of the Internet and are they same as they ever were or altogether new?

In this case it's just a question out of curiosity.

Ravi
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Ravindra N. Mohabeer, PhD
Media Studies
Vancouver Island University
Nanaimo, BC CANADA
ravindra.mohabeer at viu.ca
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