PB1B: Generating some Genres

Whilst experimenting with these vastly different “genre generators”, I found that as different as their subject matter is, they are all working towards a similar goal: to appeal to their specific audience in a way that humorously conveys a similar state of mind. This may seem like a verbose introduction, but I will elaborate on my basic meaning as this piece progresses.

                Beginning my exploration of the world of “genre generators”, I arrived at the most basic and currently popular of websites, the meme generator.  I can almost guarantee that if you walked out of your front door right this instant, located a teen between the ages of, say, 13 and 23, and asked them what a meme was, they could pull one up on their phone within seconds. Now, one could argue with me and say “Yeah well anyone can google anything these days.” To which I would respond with “You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar!” Yes, that is correct, anyone with a smartphone in hand could punch in the word “meme” on google and find thousands of words and images. However, that is not quite what I’m getting at here. My point is this: that if a young person hears the word “meme” they each have that one specific photo and set of words that tickles their funny bone; be it a photo of Tommy Lee Jones glancing condescendingly over his newspaper, or a stick figure with its hand punching straight through its face. And with each of these photos there is a conventional set of words which, when looking at the photos, most youth of today can call upon their memories and generate some set of words that correlates with any meme utilizing that specific photo. For example, a stick figure with its hand through its face? The words “facepalm” automatically come to mind. Another example might be Jonathan Goldsmith at his desk next to a bottle of Dos Equis, and I can confidently state that whatever group of words anyone puts over that photo, it will begin with “I don’t always…” and end with “but when I do, I…”. Zooming out to focus on the bigger picture here, some basic conventions of such memes are that they are almost always humorous in nature, and usually pertain to a single social interaction. The use of sarcasm and double entendre are two other conventions that run rampant throughout the meme-creating world.                          

With that last note on memes, I will shift over to my next generator, the comic strips. Similar in nature to the meme generator, the website pandyland.net/random has the goal of making its audience laugh. However the conventions of this generator have a slightly different tone than the meme generator. Some conventions of this comic strip generator are: vulgar and insensitive humor, references to currently popular phrases and/or songs such as “I just met you, and this is crazy, but…” (Which is a reference to the song “Call Me, Maybe”, but my guess is that you already knew that.), and references to popular social media sites such as twitter and Instagram.  One can see that these comic strips too are targeting a younger, more involved with the internet, audience. Another convention that separates this website from the rest is the making humorous of things that are not normally socially accepted as being found funny. For example, the words “simon noooo” followed by the other character hanging himself. This is placed here for humor where most wouldn’t think something of this nature to be funny. It is a very dry and somewhat distasteful type of humor but placed there for humor nonetheless.

The last generator is unlike the other two entirely. This generates very serious groups of text and are generally in the format of a scientific paper rather than a short group of words accompanying a picture. Here the purpose is to sound intelligent without actually having any facts backing the paper. Some conventions of this generator would be long groups of verbosely worded text that, for lack of a better description, “says a lot without actually saying anything.” For example, an excerpt from one randomly generated paper reads “a significant riddle in machine learning is the deployment of flip-flop gates”. The text is cleverly places to sound academic but holds no factual truths. Conventionally, these papers contain a lot of large nonsensical words, photo and graphs not backed by any real facts but which look realistic without any close analyzing, and the paper is concluded by a large group of “sources” that most likely do not actually exist. All three of these generators, though different in content, serve the same purpose of helping their audience better understand the concept of “genre”. Each one emphasizes a specific pattern and follows a certain type of diction that remain consistent. They each establish their own set of conventions and remain true to them with each new generated set of text. The repetition here helps nail down the concept of conventions as patterns that serve to make each genre clear-cut and easily recognizable.