Abstract

Despite the already widespread constatations on the subject of the blurring of genres in the new media [or “new new media”, as Paul Levinson has it], despite attempts to find a nomenclature able to cope with the transformations in media products [megagenre, hypergenre, hybrid genre, subgenre, minigenre], despite abandoning genre identification in favour of typological criteria or using ad hoc and temporary categories, such as folksonomy, it seems reasonable to suggest that the systematic genre identification of radio is still a fresh issue. Several causes can be enumerated. Firstly, the topic of radio genres is not a popular one among media experts, secondly, those attempts at classification that have appeared have not, unfortunately, been verified by broader academic discourse, and thirdly, contemporary radio is “dematerialising”; in the common understanding, the aural impressions reaching us in the form of waves processed by the aural apparatus ceases to be associated with a radio receiver and more with an app on an iPod, a webpage, a fragment heard on YouTube or a podcast. Naturally, a broader approach to genre becomes popular, in which not only the analysis of the contents of messages is significant but also the habits and experience of the actual users of media. Radio genres seen in the context of new media lose their traditional labels in favour of new ones, most usually typical of online ones. It is important, though, that the concept of the genre as a collection of genre-making forms is capacious enough to take into account the intermedia specifics of the creation of genres. This article describes the main problems of radio genre research taking into account the convergence and evolution of broadcaster-recipient relations.