Digital genres and the new burden of fixity

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Abstract
Stability in the production and transmission of texts hasbeen a taken-for-granted feature of communicative acts formuch of history. In the past, this fixity (i.e., the reliabilityof texts not to change over space and time) has arisenfrom the interaction between immutable technologies (usedto produce text) and social rigidity (in the structure andpractices of discourse communities where texts areproduced and consumed). These interactions providedstable settings fostering the gradual development of richcommunicative genres which, in turn, further contributedto fixity in communicative acts. In the current era ofvirtual communities and digital documents, thisrelationship between technology, social context, and fixityhas been loosened. We claim the new burden for providingfixity in communications is being met by increased relianceon genre. To support this claim, we examine the four-wayrelationship between technologies, social contexts, socialpractices and genre by considering example digitaldocuments produced by two different discoursecommunities.