 Thank you so much. And thank you for this morning's panel presentation, what a stimulating way to begin this two-day symposium grown into a small conference. So of course it goes without saying that I will take a social action view of genre, but I do want to say a little bit about the perspective on the social action view of genre that I'm going to activate today. I'm going to highlight some things, and a lot of other things will stay in shadow. I'm going to highlight Bactin's notion of the sphere of activity, where there is a sphere of activity, where people are engaged with one another, where they're doing things together. They'll have mutual intentions, interests, identifications, and motives. So a Bactinian, a Burkian, and then a Bitsarian view of genre as social action. There will be or there can be an experience when people are doing things together of rhetorical exigence and the feeling that in this situation a certain kind of thing should be said now by certain people. In other words, genre isn't just knowing how, it's knowing to speak. And when utterance is embedded in a sphere of activity, it's recognizable not only to the participants, but also to some degree to overhearers. The more distant we are from the sphere of activities, the more the sound of its speech will be what Bactin called local color. But nevertheless, however remote or close up we are, we have the sensation of types, the sensation of recognition, and then I think possibly epiphenomaly or not to the experience of recognition is the activity of classification, which I've learned to embrace as part of genre. And classification can be folk, that is amongst the users and daily observers of a genre. There will be classifying activities, but also it can be specialist. And a little bit of my story today is about some attempts at, well I guess it's about both folk and specialist classification. So examples of genre in this view around the sphere of activity view would be, you know, we could alter it. We heard wonderful examples this morning, the illness narratives, the play-by-play commentary, campaign signs, yoga class, the thesis defense, the time for questions following a panel presentation. I want to say that not all speech is genreed in this way. Not all speech is in these secondary genres, what Bactin called secondary genres. Not all speech fuses to a situation or activity for this kind of recognition. Not only a form but of intention, that is. So not all speech cleaves to a sphere of activity. Those are the secondary genres that do where word and situation fuse. Bactin made a distinction between these recognizable types, the secondary, and the more mobile conversational exchanges that aren't fused to a sphere of activity, and he called those primary speech genres. He also said that secondary genres, like the ones we're, sorry, the ones we heard about this morning, derive from the primary genres. Now, this is what I say about Bactin and primary and secondary. Maybe no one else in the world would agree with that, but that's what I'm going on today. And today I'm talking about three occasions of medial change, and I'm doing so without the fallacy of exact parallels, not because I'm expert at avoiding such a fallacy, it's because there aren't very exact parallels between the three occasions, and I'm just hoping that you can see enough resemblances that we can embark on some fruitful discussion and conversation. So the first occasion is partly a story of classification, and it's partly my story, as I'm thinking of Reza this morning talking about her archeological explorations of her own changing notions, so it's a little story about me as a classifier. So 10 years ago in the New York Public Library, a display attracted my attention. It was a display of Civil War photographs. It attracted my genre theoretical eye. They were all the same size, they were six centimeters by about ten and a half centimeters. Some of them were of generals, some of them were of ordinary soldiers, some of them were of battlefields or artillery, and on Verso some had autographs or notations or little captions, and some of them had salutations. So people were mediating these photographs, they were moderating them, they were collecting and exchanging these images. So I wanted to know how did they know how to do this, but more particularly how did they know to do that. But mainly my attention was captured by the name given to the form. They were called character visite, and I thought visiting cards of Civil War generals and battlefields, I tried to imagine the social action accomplished or the communicative consciousness that is the mode of exigence, the recognition, intention, which might have sustained the use of these cards. So it looked like a full fledged genre, vanished leaving only its formal residue, and I have a little hand note here to myself. It was like finding the bones of a new dinosaur, but after this morning I'm not sure if I was a paleontologist or an archaeologist or not sure. So the exhibit was drawn from the New York Historical Society's very large collection of character visite, and I went to visit the collection. And I found that the blending of Civil War imagery with the activity visiting, the fusion that had stupefied me, was partly an artifact of the exhibit. They'd selected from the larger collection. Civil War was a dominant in the larger collection, but the imagery flowed from many scenes, many of them political, so there are lots of photos of Lincoln. There's so many copies of one photograph of George Washington's armchair. There were, what, at the time I thought were sort of ethnographic photographs of a Haida princess, a Sue Bell, and even a Swedish peasant. Niagara Falls were there, it was there in foreign capitals. And so I was celebrity, actors and actresses and the conjoined twins, Chang and Ang Tom, Tham and other persons of small stature, and Millie Chrissy, a two-headed girl. So they were all called Cart Devisite, and they were treated as one category by users who collected them and then put them in purpose published albums along with Cart Devisite of their own family members, children all dressed up and mothers and babies and so on. So there's a Brigadier General. Some of this shows, sorry, some of this shows when the characters were donated to the collection. Actually, I got interested in looking at other collections, other places. There comes a time when people no longer know what something's for, so they send it to an archive, or they send it to a museum thinking that specialists will figure out what it's for. So from about the 30s, this is from the 30s, we have another one later dated at its reception in 1950. After a certain point, memory of what to do with these cards had expired. Here's Millie Chrissy, the girl that's Niagara Falls. This isn't the Sioux princess, but it is a Tlingit or Hada, and it was Fort Simpson, which is in what is now a Northern British Columbia, and donated in 1950 to the New York Historical Society. So all these cards, the use of all these cards was enclosed in a brief period. They start to show up in the late 1850s, they really surged through the early 1860s, and by the late 1860s they nearly disappeared from use, and we only find them now in archives and attics. The phase coincided with a change in photo technology, which was named in Paris for the product's resemblance to visiting cards. And it ended with some more changes in technology, not sure I could account for that, but changes to the cabinet card, which resulted in the cabinet card, which was a bit bigger, and the stereoscope, other things going on. As one researcher has said, in this short phase there was widespread enthusiasm for the cards. In the 1860s, Romania was so expansive that by 1862 they arrived in the tropical Pacific. One study shows an artist and memorized exchanging cards, personal cards, with her shipmates in 1862. American evangelists circulated their own portraits and also arranged sittings for their foreign clients and offered these for sale. So, for example, a kimono clad child raised money for missions. So then I began to see where the Hyda Princess and the Sue Bell, and I don't know about the Swedish peasant, where they came from. So I puzzled over and marveled at the now vanished motive to collect character visite and the vanished capacity to recognize the intention in Tom Thumb's portrait being next to George Washington's armchair, or the child's portrait being next to the two-headed girl, or the Civil War general being next to the Swedish peasant. What were people saying in getting these images and putting them together? What exigence to the experience in distributing and assembling these images from such a variety of scenes and calling them all character visite? So at the time I took the lesson that form is what survives the expiry of context. I just have form. And that's stranded, and I'm thinking about the archaeology this morning, so stranded that way. Form confounds recognition of intention, and genre, my lesson, is in the consciousness that it tends the use of the form, not in the form. So I wrote a little about that, and I still use the lesson myself, but it just wasn't enough to bother other people with, so I put the piece in a drawer figuratively. Did I have another? Later on studying genre and the internet, I realized that I'd missed the point. Technology was not just an accomplice in the cart de visite story. Medial change was the cart de visite story. The technological development which left the daguerreotype behind and took up wet processing technologies. They used paper. They enabled multiple copies. They decreased the exposure time, so people didn't have to sit or brace up for such a long time, reduce size and cost. And these developments worked themselves through a whole... It wasn't just one technological breakthrough, it was a bunch of competing ones and successive business models and so on. Altogether I'd missed the point. Carite de visite were not a genre. Carite de visite was a name for the technology and by taking the cart to be a genre, I exaggerated the mystery. Sociotechnical innovation to facilitate something, overcome some obstacle, had produced a change in form. So we got the six by ten, six centimeter by ten card, sort of purple brown paper and cardboard, changed the form of images. But no one could know the meaning of the form until it was in use and it was taken up in different ways in different national cultures. That's what the research shows now. In America, everybody loved the daguerreotype apparently and they didn't want to use the cart de visite until much later than did people take it up in Europe. When cart technology did take off in America, it seized Civil War imagery but not to the exclusion of other imagery. So there were photographs of fire brigades and public institutions and early adopters recommended that people use the cart de visite for their patent applications as well. And all these categories survive in the historical society's collection. Today's scholarship shows that in England, royalty was a main vector of the technology. So here you have somebody contemporary commenting on how the cart de visite leaves far behind all other agencies for enshrining our sovereign in the homes of our people. And people, like we know now that 300,000 copies of Princess Alexandra and her child were sold. We know that there are 100,000 copies of one sitting in Queen Victoria but people knew the numbers at the time too. It's not just that archivists have done the counting now. People marveled at the numbers even in the early 1860s. Celebrity was also a vector for the technology. Evidently, actors didn't sit for the daguerreotype. You know why? Because they weren't flattering. You couldn't be sure they'd be flattering but the technology changed and the sitters could be more assured of a pleasing image resulting. So they did sit for cart de visite and so did clergy and politicians and scientific and literary men too. So as well as commenting on cartomania, that's what contemporaries called it, contemporary observers in London also noticed the means of circulation how cards were displayed in studio shop windows and today, like just very recently researchers are saying that contemporaries were troubled by the way this circulation disturbed orders of class and gender. And I realized this morning that I also comment on race as well because of ethnographic images infiltrating the shop windows as well. So Queen Victoria would be next to professional beauties which was a serious category at the time and theater folk even working class sports heroes. So people speculated was the technology a democratization or a vulgarization. So a contemporary observes that the poorest carries his three inches of cardboard and the richest can claim no more. Everybody could do this. In America it wasn't so much the shop window recent research connects the circulation of the cart de visite to the dramatic expansion in the US Postal Service mid-century. So contemporary observers say it's a craze, it's a mania and they comment on the mix of images, the jumble of categories. But the mixing would have been much less inscrutable for them than it was for me. Contemporaries would have known but I had to learn from today's scholarship. I'd seen in the collection figures that seemed to be costume but you couldn't quite tell and they would be in poses of alarm or despair What are these? But everybody at the time would have known that they were well-known actors posing according to the codes of allocation guides. So contemporaries were bemused by the swarm of imagery so they'd say it's a mania but they weren't as puzzled as I was 150 years later. Each type of imagery was a mention of some scene and the cart de visite enabled an exchange of mentions and a kind of visual conversation. The swarm was not so inscrutable. And contemporaries had some theories about this burst of popular activity. One said that it seemed that the cart de visite album did on a broader scale what the basket of visiting cards had done. It told who you were by whom you associated with, by collecting and distributing images of oneself or others, one positioned oneself. Now equally or maybe more important for this analysis people at the time experienced in that mix of images a unity under the umbrella of the new technology. They recognized the technology the medial change and they named this activity for the medial change. Even though to call it a craze is in some sense to think there might be something a little bit out of the ordinary about it. So according to recent scholarship this mix the mixing celebrity and private and so on didn't survive the technological phase. So from a genre theoretical perspective I'd like to say that photographic imagery soon differentiated into genres. The family portrait and snapshot, the picture postcard, the pornographic and sideshow genres, scientific illustration, entertainment publicity and museum cataloging. So after this medial change period of exchange these visual imageries latched to distinct spheres of activity and went on to genre status. I'm thinking what we heard this morning about the illness narratives. There may have been a period of mixing of telling and many different technology in an analogical venue but not sorted of experiences of illness and now they're sorting to certain kinds of site and they have that secondary genre status. Now I'm going to the early 21st century. So writing in 2004 and interested in what they call emergent so I'm thinking about emergent from this morning. Emergent genres driven by interactive web technologies. Herring, Scheit, Bonus and Right is an example of blogs captured in September 2003 to find out how technological changes trigger the formation of new genres which may not be quite the same thing as emergent. At that time, I think it's important that at that time I don't know if they'd say the same today. Herring's team calls the blog a bridge. They say it's span the gap between multimedia, HTML documents such as the web page and the interactive text-based formats of computer mediated communication. Whatever designers had in mind when they offered link-friendly comment-capable software, users rushed to this bridge and wrote surging across the span. So Herring's group calls the bridge a genre pointing to its having a name that starts classifying. Having a name and it's exhibiting common form and structure about the things and this was part of, I think a question or part of this morning's discussion. They had common form and structure because of the technology so amongst people who reason about emergence and classification and new media, there's quite a bit of discussion I think so far on Resolve about the hard structural features of new media genres and the soft ones. The hard ones come from the software soft ones come from interaction. So does that matter? Is that a difference? And is that a crucial difference? Is that a crucial difference about technologically originating genres? So then they do some more classifying work which is a bit more independent of the technological dimension because they have to do some sorting, they have to do some classifying to support the blog being genre. So they find common substance but they then have to go further. They find that even though people were saying at the time that blogs were externally oriented, I know not everyone was saying that, but many people were the public affairs blog, they find that in 2003 more blogs were in fact inner oriented to the more diary like domain. And they eliminate the instances where blog software is used, so the hard qualities, but it's in their opinion not for blogging purposes. And they look for genre antecedents, like here we are looking for antecedents again and that seems to be part of classifying activity and been looking for antecedents since the 70s I think when something changes. And it helps the sorting and they find that the inner oriented blog has its antecedent, the centuries old genre of the handwritten diary and the letter to the editor is the antecedent for the second place filter blog type in 2003, this is what they say. And then they find other, for instance is not captured in those two types, the filter and the personal, they find other offline antecedents, travelogues and photo albums, post it notes and so on. In other words, at this early stage when software was enabling almost anyone that is rich and poor alike, almost anyone to update frequently and to post comments, it was a very mixed traffic crossing the bridge, just about everybody was going across that bridge that you could imagine a representative of any group was on the bridge and they were all there together. Herring and the team stick to the claim for blogging's genre status, but they call it a hybrid on two dimensions. It's hybrid because it's neither unique nor reproduced entirely from offline sources and I think this is around the emergence discussion. From very early on, well at least from the 90s study of genre and new media really wanted to know if any genres were totally unprecedented until we had these technological enablers or were we always going to find an antecedent. And I was thinking that maybe people aren't so interested in that anymore, they're really interested in it in the 90s, but I think they actually are still interested. And it's also hybrid because it links the web and the CMC formats and that means that it can express a wide range of genres. So I'd like to say here that in the striving to classify at a time of medial change really puts a lot of pressure on the term genre. It's used extremely opportunistically here. Anytime something is noticed, it's called or anytime the picture clears a bit, the mob crossing the bridge kind of sorts itself a bit, we'll call it a genre. So I'm going to keep the term bridge, but I'm going to move the term genre. I'm going to say that blog names, technology, not a genre. The character visite broke through technologically from daguerreotype technologies clearing a root for images to other means of circulation. Shop window and retail distribution, the postal service, the album. Now, not identically but possibly similarly, the blog broke through or bridged domains of circulation. And at that break through, I've really been thinking about this, at the break through, at the moment of medial change classification gets quite turbulent. So I've been thinking, if a genre theorist 150 years from now saw a display of blog postings from 2003 she might be as confused as I was in my encounter with character visite in New York at the beginning of this century, like 150 years after the imagery were in use. Now this is even harder to imagine. Imagine say a genre theorist, a rhetorically informed social action type genre theorist had been at work in 1862 at a moment of medial change, she might have studied character visite and have tried to sort and define them. In fact, you know, even some of the contemporaries who were journalists, public voices, public opinion makers they looked for antecedents too. Might have tried to sort as her colleagues do in the midst of medial change. In both cases medial change overtakes genre and rhetorical motive, but I think it's not true in all cases. I think it's just some cases of medial change that rhetorical motive is overtaken for the time being temporarily suppressed. So neither character visite nor blogs are genres but they might be bridges to genres. So just as image technology carried users across to highly differentiated genres, so did blogging technology. Not only the political blog and the personal one, but now you know there will be the illness blog corporate blog, the mummy blog, food blog, and even the homeless blog. And once across the bridge and absorbed into a sphere of activity there's spheres of activity across the bridge, but it might you know, maybe it wasn't waiting there in exactly that form until the new activity had crossed the bridge to join it. So I think that with the homeless blog if advocacy is the sphere of activity, when the homeless blog arrives genre status, it probably transforms the sphere of activity as well. So following a period of apparent disorganization and unruliness when contemporary observers say, whoa, it's a craze, the differentiation reorganizes motive and communicative action recognizably. So we're not saying, whoa, it's kind of all crazy today. Restoring or renewing, revising interactions, indigenous spheres of activity. So the classification part persists because in this case, and maybe for others, not in the character visit case the classification blog persists after the differentiation. So for the last part of this talk I'm going to be asking what gets people to step onto the bridge in the first place onto that bridge of medial change. And in such swarms at the point they step on, rhetorical motive is so vague and indiscernible, especially in comparison to what it would be by the time they crossed over. So what made the first illness narrators just get on the bridge of blogging and start to talk about being sick much different from people getting on, going on to illness websites or blogging sites today after the crossing has been accomplished. So my example is online news comment. I realized too late that Twitter would have been a better example, but it was too late. So the comment function itself, suddenly there's a root from the scene of reading or viewing to another at first indiscernible scene. You're reading or viewing, all of a sudden there's more you can do, you can interact. You don't really know into what kind of rhetorical scene, but obviously many people do it before knowing. So when I first looked, so the question is, is this another mixed surge towards eventual differentiation? I'm not sure actually. When I first looked into online news comment as part of another project, I found myself I realized I didn't know until I was working on this paper. I reasoned along the same lines as Herring and her colleagues. I started classifying by inferring antecedent. I thought, it's the letter to the editor. It's the antecedent. I was thinking the letter to the editor has been really generative. There are a lot of online genres that are attributed to the letter to the editor. Anyway, I've got some reasoning here about the difference between the letter and what happened with the technological transfer, but I think it won't take time for it. There are differences between the letter to the editor and the online comment attributable to the technology of the online setting. And those differences have left the letter to the editor intact and surviving. In other words, its social action is not accomplished by online comment. Still there. We're still going to do that. Similarly for the literary antecedent of the illness narrative, we're still going to have the literary genre there too, but there may be other genres that do disappear once the online is able to accomplish or fulfill all the motives. Letters, even as survivors, are just a small stream, just like a narrow canal. Tributary to news while comments are a roaring flood or a surging crowd on the technological bridge and unorganized compared to the letter to the editor. So what are people doing? So in March, a Vancouver broadsheet published a news item about a petition to the council of the Vancouver suburb to regulate commercial signage requiring that all signs include English. Hundreds of comments within a few hours. Hundreds and hundreds what are people doing? Obviously they're not occupied doing other things. They're busy commenting and exchanging comments. Hundreds and hundreds of comments. Also there is research looking into what kind of news items trigger really massive, abundant comment. And one of the dimensions can be the locality. If the news item has to do with something local and that combines with other triggers then you'll get explosion of comment. So I'm presenting this to this typical although I don't have at the moment the data to support. Its typicality is an impression. I'm not saying this is unusual for hundreds and hundreds of comments to follow a report of a petition to city council of the Vancouver suburb. Okay so why are people doing this? What is all this clamor about? I might call it a mania. Intention and motive just not so clear. But something else is clear. This is not garble. It has the pragmatic profile of heated conversation and I recognize this. It's got the vocatives, raised voices the insults and epithets and all the formation of divisions pushing away, drawing closer affiliations and fiercely engaged dyads who are deaf to persistent attempts of other speakers to get response. It's got sarcasm and it's got meta comments on the quality of exchange. I kept thinking because I've obviously read hundreds and hundreds of pages of these, not just these ones. I kept thinking it's like just before last call at a pub where it is conversation but it's got some kind of accelerant in it. So we may not have the secondary genres embeddedness in a sphere of activity signals to us in recognizable ways. But we do have the mobile generators of conversation. So conversation primary genre has a generative mobility. It can go anyplace. That's the thing about conversation. It's not latched to a sphere of activity. It can move all over. So it seems and I'm not sure, the medium, the topic that people are writing about is almost immaterial and that's why I put it in small print. You don't even have to read that. Because the topic is almost immaterial I say almost because well if you read online comments, you know it's not, I don't know if it's not very funny but it's one of the jokes that I've heard repeated many times that if you watch, if you read online response for long enough eventually Nazis will be mentioned. I would just break that down a little bit and I'd say if there's any chance to get race, gender or something about authority and class on the table it will come. And they're not really topics. They're like influencers. They're like agile provocateur and they're at the sidelines of online comments. They're just rubbing their hands while their online commentary begins to veer and it gets a little more heated. There they are. Anyway, I'll show you. Okay. So no need to read all this. I just wanted to demonstrate. I've taken the pragmatic features of conversation. So if we thought of this in disciplinary terms these are the kind of things that conversation analysis would pull out. I've done it in a very simple way. Whereas we're more used to looking at what rhetorical analysts would draw out. And I think that's the difference between secondary genre studies and primary genre studies that actually have tended to belong to different methodologies. So you've got, this is from right in the middle. The report has been online for less than an hour already hundreds, dozens of comments. And somebody, I'm just starting right in the middle here. So a poster says exactly that. You've got the proximity of conversation. You don't have to summarize what the previous person has said and so on. And then you've got caps for that raised voice and the aggressive get use to it response to the previous poster. And then another evocative tone off. You don't need to shout. There's the comment on the exchange generally. In the pub somebody might be saying, okay simmer down, simmer down. Don't need to shout. I think the police are coming. And I totally agree with you. But also an affiliation and that, oh here it is, discrimination. So we've got the kind of the racial, a genre provocateur at the side rubbing their hands. And an evocative, Jordan Wong okay, but that okay is not affiliative it's divisive. It's going to say okay, okay buddy. And then we've got relax, one other comment. We've got discrimination disrespect. Your point would be better made if you avoided making generalizations. General remark, when you shout like that, I can't even hear what you're saying. Yeah, go to China. And what you would see in Hong Kong, Judy, another evocative. These are all one after the other. I haven't exerted them. I haven't left any out. Evocative, Leah, I agree with you affiliative. But sigh, you know we've got it's too bad it's this way. And then we've got the most wonderful sarcasm with evocative and it's sarcasm on a comment on the conversation itself. Thanks for the lesson. I'll endeavor to shape the way. It's fabulous. Okay, so as you can imagine if you attend to online comments at all, you'll know what happens next. After about an hour or so later things have deteriorated into a brawl. There's incomprehensible sarcasm. I can tell which side people were affiliating with. The sarcasm is so gnarled and some really savage exchanges. Well this just shows low intelligence poor education. So clean. What do you teach it? Janitorial services? Only an idiot, only a moron and so on. And then it calms down a bit because new posters join. I guess it would be like other people sitting down at the table. People coming into the probably just before the last column. But then of course it's just straight oppositional. It's racist. It's got evocative. Seems to me you are mind. Bleeding heart, blow heart. Disagrees one thing. You're just that internet fail is all you are. So anyway okay. So these people are enthusiastic about the technology. They keep coming back for more. Now I wanted to say that on the bridge here the interaction is conversational primary genre. I'm going to be asking Kenneth sustain itself like that. But you're going to say how do you know what about the other online comments. So I want to show sorry I took a little jump. I think I'll leave this out. I had an example of a much less incendiary topic which also ended up with just to show that it's not just signs and English and language and settlement issues this was about the salt in your food whether industries should be regulated anyway. Just to show that I hadn't just picked a particularly volatile topic. I had no idea that salt would excite this kind of worry about authority and this kind of insult. Okay. So I want to show another kind of online news comment. And it's online comment to sports reports. And it's really quite different from other types of online kind of online comments we've just looked at. Within minutes people will come online commenting on how certain talent and a team is underrated or overrated. They'll talk about scoring opportunities. They'll talk about management and it's errors or accomplishments but here's a first posting after a report of a game. I'm not going to read this but I'm not going to write it. But I can hear from a long way away that it's a genre. It's on topic. It's expert. We were talking about expert and professional earlier today. It may be folk but it's informed and if we look at the next this exchange comes from another report. Here a player was sent to the minors 63 comments in a very short period of time. And this is a little bit more like the other. There's some give and take here and there's a little bit of affiliation and there's a vocative. But it's more like a couple of sportscasters exchanging comments and smart remarks. Some of them are just very casual way to go jets. But all of these posters share the same specialist wordings. They stay on topic. They don't go over to race, gender or class and authority. Before online news comment technology mentions these posters would only have exchanged such mentions in primary conversational genres and the distinction would be that they would be exchanged in a setting that was not devoted to this activity. So it might have been at the pub against, I seem to think about that as a catch-all for all the activity that now goes on online or the workplace or the golf course. You could imagine them exchanging comments about hockey on the golf course. But the golf course wasn't about hockey. So I think what online technology has done for these participants has allowed them to cross the bridge for a genre that's not, obviously not entirely unprecedented. It has very prestigious connections to well-defined spheres of activity like sports industries, broadcast column, the print press and so on. But they are now full-fledged participants in their way. Amateur, they're not professional, but maybe there's something like the illness narrators. So I wouldn't do this but I recognize a degree of motivating involvement and intention in this. So what brings people to the bridge in the first place? Even the sports posters before there is a well-structured form established as I'm arguing there is now and I don't actually know what it looked like first but that would be a great thing to research. Before there was a well-established recognizable genre, what makes people go on to the bridge? So Carol Miller and Don Shepherd have said that technological affordances have a swasery aspect. They appeal to us, they make people believe that they want to do the things they do online. And for sure people's pleasure in early photo technology certainly supports this. But I'd like to add to this what Miller and Shepherd call directionality. I'd like to add to affordances people's capacity for conversation for the primary genres. A patterned interaction with turn-taking and chiming in and drowning out and dyad forming and so on. A patterned interaction, the materials of which are the mentionable, detachable, verbal images of contemporary culture eligible for exchange. In the activity of exchanging information is produced about one's position vis-a-vis others. An updating. Where do I stand? What are the opportunities for affiliation? The proximity of antagonistic interests. One research publication from all things a journal called Financial Management investigated how people participated on stock market message boards. Now you'd think, no there's not a problem there because that's a well-defined sphere of activity. Even the researchers published in Financial Management thought it was a craze. They thought it was pretty strange, the level of activity of the persistent poster. So they interviewed a persistent poster. Why do you do this? And he said well he liked to get his ideas out there and get reaction to them. So I thought well it's kind of, you know that's a little bit like online but then he went on and he said but what happened was in conversation once you proposed your idea then you had to defend it. So he would defend his analysis of some market situation and follow up on it with investment. And what the researchers found was that his portfolio actually suffered from this kind of interactional motive. That he wasn't getting material advantage. He must have been getting some other advantage. It was about himself vis-a-vis others. And in the meantime as well other researchers, particularly in information studies, are starting to listen in on online commentary to find out what prompts it, how comment turns into conversation and so on. And researchers in certain areas are listening in on online comments. So for example researchers in public health listened in on the online comments around the H1N1 virus and they find health ideas but the byproduct of their research is that they find affiliations and like-mindedness and antagonisms activated by health topics. So we could say that ideas about health are ways of affiliated. One can get together with people or separate from people. Ways of scanning the social environment. To have ideas about health to go online and talk about H1N1 news reports is a way of scanning the social environment. So technology enabled exchange of visual imagery like exchange of ideas of a vaccine which is what happens when people responded to online H1N1 news reports. This was an interactional means of positioning to update their information on the environment. So it's not just knowing that Queen Victoria is out there and here's her picture. It's knowing that others know and have this idea about her. We're not just acquiring information we're acquiring the relativity of that information. It's distribution and the attitudes that are distributed along with it or that distributor that grow up. So I'd say that capacity or even take the risk and say the instinct for primary genre conversation and the attraction of the affordance are what get some people onto the bridge in the first place. Others may remain puzzled. And once on the bridge, some conversation crosses relatively quickly into a sphere of activity and secondary genre status. So the sports online comments I would think would be those. And I have an example from Care2DZ but I can leave that. The question is, can some activity, can primary genres stay on the bridge forever? Is that possible? Because the remarkable thing about primary genres is that they are mobile. They can go anywhere. They don't need a sphere of activity. But they do need a social platform. They need a golf course or a pub or a workplace or even a queue at the bus stop. And then they'll keep moving around. It's an interactional benefit, very incremental. It's scanning of the social environment. But can when there isn't that social platform, how long can the technology sustain that conversational motive? All by itself. And it may, I don't want to, I don't know. I just keep saying to people, you'll have to go to the, give a talk. And the urge is always to be definitive to say and you will see that this will happen and then of course it doesn't happen and around the media and so I'm wondering if the conversational motive, that activity that you need to update the environment, your sense of your environment. When it is unaccompanied by a platform of existing association, produces some of the extremes and marvels of internet exchange. But I don't know. Anyway, that's as far as I go today. Thank you.