PB1B: Genre Generators

Across the web, there are various random generators that give you all sorts of different media and short bursts of entertainment. Depending on which internet generator you are using, you will encounter a mixed bag of subject matter and genre within that specific generator. Usually a generator will be geared toward one specific type of media, but the subject matter may still be very diverse within that generator. Let's take boredbutton.com for example, every time you refresh the page, the generator will present you with a different activity, challenge, trick, illusion, or some other type of interactive experience in which the user of the generator is entertained. Often you refresh the page and you are presented with a challenging game. Other times it might give you your age in weeks or some other interesting fact about you or the world. The point is, boredbutton.com falls into a specific genre of internet generators that gives the user an entertaining and somewhat "fun" experience because of its specific conventions (random games, interactive activities, etc) and is not the only one of its kind.

Another popular internet generator would have to be all of the meme generators around the web. These generators remind us of a simpler time in meme history, when most memes included just two main ingredients: an iconic image recognized ubiquitously across the web, and a line of big bold text at the top of the image and at the bottom. When examining these meme generators as a genre of internet generator, we can see the recurring conventions that each of these websites include to give the user a streamline and easy way for them to create a meme without needing the help of an expensive, professional grade photo editing program like Photoshop or Illustrator. For example, some of these meme generators give you an enormous selection of memes for you to create a meme with, and this is just one convention of a meme generator. The other conventions of a meme generator would be the obvious boxes or area for you to enter the text you want the meme to have either on the top of the image or the bottom, and an option for you to upload your own image. Perhaps the most obvious convention of a meme generator would be the memes! Lots of memes are found over and over again on different meme generators because of their high level of popularity. These are usually iconic moments from a popular movie, a screenshot from a popular viral video, a picture depicting some political figure, or an illustration that has made its way to meme stardom.

Another internet generator I analyzed was pandyland comics and other comic generator websites. Pandyland generates comics that feature the same two generic looking dudes that always succeed to deliver a big surprise. These comics can be random and seemingly meaningless at face value, but some of them clue us into a deeper societal commentary if we view them symbolically. This is something seen across the board in web comics, and we can define the conventions of comic generators even further. The internet spoils our attention span, so it makes sense that most to all of the comics produced on pandyland are very short and may take only a couple seconds to read and fully absorb. This is true for most comic generators; the reader is flipping through comic to comic since they are so short, and you'll seemingly never run out of comics to get you through whatever boring situation you find yourself in.

Even if all of these examples are just internet generators, by closely examining the specific characteristics of them, we can discuss and define their genre and put them into categories based off of the repeating conventions found in the generators, and this exact principle holds true in literature!