Are we all Technically a Genre? - by Shae Goudie

Image Received from: https://cataids.wordpress.com/tag/genre-headings/

It has now been one week into my exploration of DaviantArt. By this stage, I have successfully been able to understand the aspect of "following" users, and "liking" their artwork that they have posted. With this social website being primarily for the use of sharing personal artwork, I have noticed that there are many different "cliques" of the DeviantArt community. With meaning, there are a drastic amount of similarities in some artworks, banding together a group of users based in their interests, creating what could be defined as a "genre" of people. With group formation, comes power in the way they are able to interact and reach different crowds of people.

Space and place is the new frontier of todays online society. Space and place are a way of defining different areas of place in the social networks. It can be easily split to explore in different categories, such as, genre, texts and networks, technology, identity, and many more. Having invesigating a artisic social network, I have come to terms with many of these areas of fields that are used in this social network. Genre is the class of texts or cultrual products, grouped into sub-classes based on similarities and conventions. To give an example, music is grouped into subclasses based on the style of music that is being produced. Such as, classical, pop, rock.   "Genre both enables and restricts meaning" (Frow, 2013, pg.25). Frow persuades the idea of how powerful genre can be in todays society, as it gives options to either see it from the highnsight of being able to produce meaning, or eliminate the imagination that art can give you.

In DeviantArt, genre is used fluently in the concept of groups of similarities forming together to create a community. Genre is used drastically to organise a space in a way we can classify it and understand the term in our own mind. Tate, a highly popular website based on arts exhibitions, explains genre in art as, "

Genres are types of painting. These were codified in the seventeenth century as (in descending order of importance) history, portrait, genre (scenes of everyday life), landscape and still life." (Tate, 2017). This is highly relevant to the space of DeviantArt in a sense of paintings being classified in all types of sceneory based on ones personal life and attributes.

To conclude todays blog, I begin to wonder about the space and place that define who I am. Through the way that I have lived my life in the past, and how I plan to follow through with it in the future. What sort of area do I fall into when thinking about genre and technologies?

I will continue to explore this fascinating world of DeviantArt, and hopefully  uncover more attributes that make this social networking space, what it is today.

Until next time,

Shae Goudie

Refrences

Frow, 2013, p.g. 25

 Genres- Art Term / Tate. (2017). Retrieved 17th August 2017, from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/g/genres

Genre headings | Cataloguing Aids Blog. (2012). Cataids.wordpress.com. Retrieved 17 August 2017, from https://cataids.wordpress.com/tag/genre-headings/ (image)