The "self-own" as retroactive genre

The screengrabbed tweet below is a clean example of a genre that is sometimes called a "self-own". 

(Screenshot by Twitter user David Harrison @davidlharrison)

The tweet itself has suffered a fate which is known as being "ratioed" on Twitter. Being "ratioed" means that the number of comments to a tweet strongly outpaces the number of likes and retweets. It's not a good thing, because it invariably means that the tweet has been met with a storm of negative replies (a positive respondent would also like and sometimes retweet the tweet.)  As I am writing this, the tweet has risen to 1,300 likes and 305 retweets, which is quite good, but also to a staggering 6,700 comments—which is downright awful. 

The replies are merciless. They point out that the Hotel Imperial in Vienna is a Mariott Hotel, and thus American owned. They point out that Austria's government up till recently was closely allied with the far right. They point out that the Austrian government cannot be held responsible for the state of elevators in Austrian hotels, because they are privately owned, since Austria is nowhere near a socialist country. They point to the staircases. Also, there is incivility going on. Loads and loads of often highly original incivility. it's all very entertaining—and very well deserved.

Without speaking of it as a genre, Merriam-Webster's listing of "Words We're Watching" includes this beautiful description of the self-own: 

On social media, people will often try to put themselves in positions where they look smarter than the person with whom they are arguing, only to have it blow up in their faces. They might, for example, inadvertently highlight evidence that contradicts their point, or simply present themselves in a way that comes off as more pathetic than the person they are trying to upstage. It is during such instances that we become witness to the glorious phenomenon of the self-own. (here) 

One could almost think that the description was written for Luntz' tweet; and it's a very good genre summary. The genre label "self-own", thus, describes a social action that backfires badly and in which a person tries to do one thing, usually something not very pleasant, only to experience a well-deserved backfire. The person has tried to "dominate" (the word is, again, from Merriam-Webster's description) someone or something, but finds that the only person being dominated is himself or herself.

Now, it's fairly clear that the genre of the self-own is not one, most people would actually attempt. In Rhetorical Genre Studies, a movement I seem to belong to without having ever actually applied for membership, we usually see genres as recurrent forms of discursive action. You need something done, and the genre is your way to do it. 

All this is well and good in most cases, but there are interesting exceptions. The self-own is one such exception. It is a retrospective genre label, one that is attached to an utterance after the fact; once it becomes clear that the utterance has actually turned into a self-own.

One of the key concepts in contemporary genre theory is Anne Freadman's rightfully famous concept "uptake", it describes genre use as based on an inherent "bi-directionality". The fundamental idea is that the genre identity of a given utterance is never completely fixed, but can be modified by later genre uses. The self-own demonstrates this by being a genre that can well-nigh only be applied after the original genre use. As Freadman describes it, a genre use invites certain uptakes, but cannot fully secure them. The genre identity of any given utterance is thus subject to a negotiation—and at times an interpretive power struggle. 

The self-own is by its very definition an agonistic genre, as it not only retroactively defines the utterance in a negative light, but portrays the person making the utterance as a someone who has brought the backlash on herself or himself, and who deserves the backlash to the full. Frank Luntz is a case in point.

There is however, at least one way—and dare I say: a very sensible one—in which a genre user can use the existence of the self own pro-actively. It has to do with securing and inviting uptakes. The Luntz tweet invited the uptake that turned it into a self-own, even if that uptake was unwanted. In the process it failed to secure the positive, affirming uptake it was aiming for. However, it remains fully possible to stop and think before speaking. And one thought might be: "does this utterance invite uptakes that would turn it into a a self-own". This line of thinking is highly recommended as it can lead to all kinds of good things—genre wise, discursive, socially, and otherwise. 

But, of course, if you are the kind of person liable to post bigoted stupidities, hoping for reflection and discursive pre-meditation may be too big a genre ask. 

Genre labels and fake news

In a previous post I wrote about the genre "real news" as opposed to "news" on the assumption that the genre label "real news" wasn't well-established, but that the rhetorical move performed while invoking it was very strong indeed.

In the present post, I address a genre label that has risen to prominence in recent years: fake news. 

A crucial, sometimes efficient, sometimes highly problematic, feature of genre is that genres tend to naturalize themselves. They become habitual, invisible even. We can do a lot of thinking and a lot of acting with genre with knowing it. "Fake news" is such a chameleon.

Today, the genre label "fake news" is everywhere in debate. It's well-nigh impossible to log on to social media without encountering it, and the phenomenon it covers seems to be responsible for major societal challenges. However, this is a very recent development, and if you go back just a few years not only did few people know what "fake news" meant, those that did, knew that it meant something else. It meant news satire. Thus, this book which is on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. Notice the subtitle.

This one about The Onion and Philosophy is also quite confident in its usage of the "fake news" label to mean "news satire". Again, notice the subtitle.¨

I know all of this, because I research news satire and used to say that I worked with "fake news". Way back then, in 2015 and early 2016, I drew well-nigh no public attention at all with the term and had to explain it wherever I went.

However, at some point during 2016 all of this changed. "Fake news" was suddenly on everybody's lips. It wasn´t even early in the year, more like mid-late 2016, when the US presidential election heated up. But the genre label had a new meaning (or rather two new meanings, I'll get back to that); and the older meaning was well-nigh forgotten. If you say "fake news" today you definitely don´t make people expect to hear about news satire. This demonstrates two interesting features about genre labels.

• They can can change their meaning; they can even rise to prominence without retaining their original meaning. 
• When a cultural phenomenon rises to prominence it is going to need a genre label.

Along the way, the meaning of the word "fake" in the genre label itself changed. An old beloved dictionary of mine defines the word "fake" in this way:

To do up, to cover up defects and faults so at to give a presentable appearance to, to doctor; to contrive, to fabricate, to make up from defective material; to cheat, to fraud, to deceive. n. A thing thus prepared for deception, esp. a manufactured antique <...> a swindle, a dodge.

In this sense, in its original meaning, "news satire", the meaning of the word was ironic. The news satire services themselves pointed to the fradulent character of their news reporting. Thus UNnews, a service of the Wikipedia parody Uncylopedia describes itself like this:

UnNews is a service of Uncyclopedia that spreads misinformation and cons the public into swallowing it hook-line-and-sinker (and worm), by guilefully making it resemble authentic news articles. UnNews stories use satire to ensure the most unfair and biased reporting possible.

So, the cheating is clearly labelled, and there is no actual disinformation taking place, though there is a lot of pretend disinformation. (Isn´t it lovely btw?)

In the new usage, however, the "fake" in the term clearly refers to a fraudulent intention in the supposed news reporting. It is a purposeful swindle, a dodge. Like a manufactured antique, it is there to make you buy something that you would do better to avoid. The sudden rise to prominence of a genre label clearly points to the fact that something had become exigent in the public sphere: the information value and trustworthiness of what appeared to be news reporting. Disinformation in presumed news reporting had become critical.

As recent developments in the Cambridge Analytica- scandal have again demonstrated, it is no coincidence that this happend alongside the Brexit-vote and the US presidential election. Fake news has been a key term to understand both. And it has been pertinent ever since. However, no sooner had the term risen to prominence, before it acquired two different meanings. Related, but quite obviously opposed.

One was the disinformation posing as news spread by the likes of Breitbart, InfoWars and similar - sometimes even more obscure - "news" services, but also frequently presented by supposed serious media institutions. Here, false stories were fabricated to achieve a social impact - in particular through repostings on social media. It's worth noticing that these stories are closer to bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense than to lying. It does not matter if the untruths get exposed; in fact claiming that the pope or this or that actor supports Trump's election is bound to be found out. However, the revelation lags behind the fabricated story which spreads like wildfire across SoMe and reaches far more people than the, less dramatic, correction. So, the swindle-stories are written for effect; not to hide the truth per se, but to spread a certain kind of disinformation. In this case, therefore, the "fake news" genre label is used to warn against a certain kind of disinformation. And as such it has been fairly effective.

However, at the same time, or following it closely. another meaning arose. It was used by the very disinformers themselves to attack not fabricated news stories, but the channels that reported the actual news. If, for example, a news story is inconvenient to the sitting US president, it is labelled "fake news"; no matter how well documented it is. Rhetorically speaking, it's a lame-ass bully defense and can be torn apart easily in rational discourse, but again it is strangely effective. Again, it doesn´t matter if the lie is disingenuous and exposed as long as the disinformation works; as long as you can get the MAGA-crowd to shout "fake news", you can de-legitimize the actual news reporting and legitimize your own actions without having to answer for them.

So, the genre label "fake news" has moved from a fairly harmless, if somewhat confusing label for news satire to a critical cultural battleground in the fight to retain Western democracy as we know it. If you can define what news stories belong to the genre, if you can label them, you can win the rhetorical battle over what information gets to count in the public sphere and thus further the public acceptance of your political agenda. Be it democratic or despotic.

For further reading, this rather good academic article disambiguates the different usages nicely.

The blog post was originally written as a Twitter thread to celebrate my 5000th follower. The thread can be seen here.

Update April 16th: I forgot to mention that most of what I know about genre labels I have learnt from my former PhD student Jacob Ølgaard Nyboe. Some of Jacob's fine work with genre labels and genre signatures can be found in his brilliant article "The Game of the Name" here.

Genre, Persuasion and Truth in Public Opinion

It is a commonplace in contemporary genre studies that genres are something akin to omnipresent in human culture, communication and cognition, and, thus, that we as social beings learn, think and act through genres. (More on the basic tenets of genre studies here). In research, this is usually attributed to Carolyn Miller's groundbreaking article "Genre as Social Action" (1984 - more about it here). So, given that, we must expect any large scale campaign to influence public opinion to be deeply dependent on genres. This includes any participation in a large scale debate like the UK-Brexit debate (on genre in the Brexit debate here).

However, it is worth noticing, that genre use is never automatic. There is always an individual element involved. Amy Devitt puts it this way: "genres [...] live and breathe through individual instances and interactions across and within genres". (2009, 39) So, coming from the stance of genre research we would expect to find many genres creatively used, when we search for influences on public opinon.

To this we have to add one more point: Genres are regulators too, They enable particular ways of presenting any given topic, and they allow for different variations and deviances from what would usually be considered normal communication. The vagueness of that last sentence calls into question, of course, whether such a thing as "normal" communication even exists; in particular, given that I have already said that all communication is involved with genre.

But I digress. To understand what is meant by the claim that genres allow for different variations in communication, look at the slogan in the picture below.

The slogan, encountered on the central shopping street in Copenhagen, "Strøget" is on the front of - you guessed it - an Emporio Armani shop. It juxtaposes two statments "Everyone has a different story" and "Everyone wears Emporio Armani". Interestingly, the two statements may look alike, but there is a quite crucial distinction. The first statement is obviously true, the second is obviously not true. Not everone wears Armani. If for no other reason then simply because that stuff is expensive. Even if it is the cheaper Armani brand. In fact, the point of the slogan is probably to highlight how Emporio Armani is a more price-accessible brand than Armani proper.

Does the not-true claim then mean that Emporio Armani is lying in the slogan? Not by a long shot. The genre is "commercial slogan", and it is known that the truth felicity conditions of such a slogan are different than those of other genres. So you may blame the slogan if it causes you to make bad choices in couture purchases, if the stuff is overpriced, or if the product advertised is of bad quality. But claiming that the slogan lies by saying that everone wears Emporio Armani is silly.

Moving from this back to a parallel example from attempts to influence public opinion. A very obvious example of a genre used to influence public opnion is the election or referendum promise. Now, it is obvious that the election or referendum promise is social action: It is a form of persuasion. It is also obvious that it moves between norms and creativity/variation.

The promise is normative. It can only be effective, if the voters believe that it carries a certain weight. And it has to be formed in accordance with specific genre norms in order for the voters to even recognize it as a promise. At the same time the promise is creative. It has to be new, it has to inspire a feeling strong enough to make voters vote, and it has to distinguish the person or movement making the promise from the competition. If you successfully combine the two you get a rhetorically effective promise; one which acts in the situation, one which makes voters follow you.

However, the question remains: When can an election or referendum promise be said to be fraudulent; be said to be a lie or a manipulation? In particular, since in one sense they are all manipulations: they try to make us do what the utterer want. There is no free pass like the one, I just awarded the commercial slogan. If you say something you know to be false, in an election or referendum promise, you are indeed lying.

However, there are still complications. Let me stick to just one. Those of us who live in parliamentary systems based on proportional representation, rather than on first-past-the-post, know that minority governments or coalition governments are quite common. Single-party majority governments are hard to achieve. Thus, you must compromise, and some of the compromises WILL affect the promises you made during your election campaign. And - please note - this is not lying. This is a trade-off, and an intelligent electorate (oh does such a unicorn even exist?) will know that.

Why is it not lying? Because the electorate did not give the party the political strenght to follow its promise all the way through. Let me illustrate: An amazone captain tells her general "I will conquer this city if you give me 10.000 able bodied warriors". The general gives her 5.000, she attacks, but fails to conquer the city. But the general is not entitled to say: "You are a liar. You promised me to conquer the city."

Back to politics: This does not make the election or referendum promise void after the referendum. It merely sets the question: When can a politician or a political movement feasibly be said to have followed through on a campaign promise? Often, the answer must be case by case. But I think it could be feasibly said that an election promise is false/the promiser is lying if the promise contradicts established knowledge that was available to the promiser at the time the promise was made. Also, the promiser can prove false if the electorate gives her or him the political strength to fulfill the promise, nothing radical happens to block the promise, and the promise is still not acted coherently upon.

So, for instance, the infamous BrexitBus-promise (during the UK Brexit referendum campaign 2016 (see above) fails obviously on the first point. Not only was it known that the 350 million was far too high, it was also known at the time that the gain would be more than offset by losses on other counts. Thus, Emporio Armani may not have lied, but Boris Johnson sure did. The information was available and you had to be dumber than a bag of hammers, or seriously mislead, by false promises to buy into the assumptions underpinning the promise.

A promise which after-the-fact exposed a false promiser, was the recurrent claim before the election that "leave" did not imply that the UK would leave the Single Market. It is absolutely fair to say that you became what is known in the Brexit debate as a RemainerNow (a person who voted to leave the EU, but has since changed her mind) because UK-politicians failed this promise by working actively to take the country out of the single market and even claiming that this was the will of that aberrant metaphysical entity The Will of The People.

So, indeed, genre - as well as our interpretation and use of it - plays a crucial role in the shaping of public opinion. Though few reflect upon it, we are actually quite strong genre interpreters and genre users (read more here).
This post, like the preceeding one, is based on a twitter thread. Find the original thread here.

Brexit Genres

I am supposedly on Twitter to discuss genre research (my twitterhandle is indeed  @genreresearch). However, as a huge fan of the EU, I have been lured into spending quite a bit of time hanging around the #FBPE-crowd and discussing Brexit instead. 

Or is that indeed "instead"? A central finding of genre studies is that genre is well-nigh omnipresent in human culture, cognition, and communication. Thus, we think, react, and act in genre patterns, and we all have a surprising aptitude for understanding and using genre. Thus, if you participate in the Brexit debate it may never have entered your mind that you are constantly using and discussing genre. But you are.

Allow me to show you.

At the center of the Brexit debate (itself a genre) is a thing called a "referendum". That's a genre. Moreover, this particular referendum had as its particular character that it was an "advisory referendum". A variant genre or, if you will, subgenre to the referendum. Now, as you know, the fact that this was an "advisory referendum" meant that a number of safeguards connected to stonger referendums (for example a demand for a supermajority) were not present. Had such safeguards been in place, Brexit wouldn´t be on its way

However, and this is, as you still know very well, just not in those terms, the result of the advisory referendum result (another genre) was taken up, not as a narrow win (yet another genre), but as an expression (genre) of a metaphysical entity called The Will of The People. This nonewithstanding that there were critical problems connected to several crucial genres in connection with the advisory referendum. One being that one of the campaigns (genre) leading up to the referendum were dominated by lies (yet another genre). Another genre which should ideally have played a crucial role to both campaigns, the "expert testimony", was aggressively discounted beforehand, and never got to play its necessary part in enligtening the decision of the voters.

Then, of course, there was the hidden asymmetry of the "voting ballot" (yep that's a genre too) which displayed to completly unequal opportunities, one well-known and stable (remain) another almost wholly unknown and highly dramatic (leave) as if they were similar.

And this is just the beginning. The resulting "advise", taken up as a "decision", gave rise to "negotiations", and "debates", including (far too few) "parliamentary debates". Into this came "newspaper headlines" and "articles" leading to, among other things "death threats". Leading, of course, to the rise of a number of "SoMe interchanges" which helped form "hashtags" (yep, a genre). So basically y'all. While we are FBPE-ing, we are also acting in accordance with a set of genre expectations.

This post is a genre-reconfiguration. It was originally a Twitter thread. You can see the thread here. After the thread I have added a number of specimen of other, more special genres I have found in the Brexit debate. Check it out.