Jason Mittell, an professor of American studies and film and media culture, argues that genres: (source: Essay on Cultural Approach To Television Genre Theory )
are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience and cultural practices as well.
...To summarize, genres have traditionally been treated as textual components. Although genres are categories of texts, texts themselves do not determine, contain, or produce their own categorization. Generic categories are intertextual and hence operate more broadly than within the bounded realm of a media text. Even though texts certainly bear marks that are typical of genres, these textual conven- tions are not what define the genre. Genres exist only through the creation, circu- lation, and reception of texts within cultural contexts. Textual analysis cannot examine media genres as they operate at the categorical level—there are texts that are categorized by genres, but their textual sum does not equal the whole of the genre. Instead, we must separate the practice of analyzing generically labeled texts from analyzing genre as a cultural category. Analyses of generic texts are certainly worthwhile, but they do not explain how genres themselves operate as categories. We thus need to rethink genres in different terms and propose their analysis using different methods. But what is this new approach?
From the MANGeR pack:
In short, industries use genre to sell products to audiences. Media producers use familiar codes and conventions that often make cultural references to their audience's knowledge of society + other texts. Genre allows audiences to make choices about what products they want to consume through acceptance in order to fulfil a particular pleasure.This goes well with Barthes's cultural code.
His aforementioned essay goes on to say a lot about music videos in its TV origins/context, looking at Michael Jackson.
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