Genre Emergence in Amateur Flash

Abstract

While genre emergence is a recurrent theme in research on digital media, studies of genre emergence tend to adopt approaches that do not clearly bring out role of the community in which the genres emerge. This chapter develops an approach in which a quantitative social network analysis informs our study of genre emergence in Flash animations posted to Newgrounds.com, a major web portal for amateur Flash. Results indicate that participants' social network positions are strongly associated with the genres of Flash they produce, and that social processes of support and competition are key to understanding genre emergence in the Newgrounds context. We argue from these findings that a social network approach can be crucial to understanding genre emergence.