In Chandler’s “Game Theory”, genre is defined by Robert
Hodge and Gunther Kress as “typical forms of texts which link kinds of
producer, consumer, topic, medium, manner and occasion” and multimodality is
defined by Kress as “the theory of communication that discusses the combination
and utilization of multiple modes of media in order to relay a message”. The
similarity between the two lies in that they both are used as groupings of
several factors that are used in communications and media. For example, genre
is used as the grouping of everything that it takes to create the media, such
as the creator or mood. However modes are more of what is inside the medium as
opposed to what it takes to create it, such as font size or layout.
I like to
think of genre as the outer shell of a medium, and the mode as the inner core.
From what I understood in the article, genre is more of everything that it
takes to create something, whereas mode is everything that is already in it
that helps the message it is trying to communicate. However, that is not to say
that each is independent of each other. The relationship they have is important
to creating and communicating a message because you cannot an empty shell, or a
naked core. Relying on genre to create something solely will not work, just as
using mode on its own will not be effective in the medium. It is when the two
are coupled together that a message can successfully be communicated, as
multimodality will group all every mode together to compose the inner workings
and genre will take hold of everything around the mode that comprises the outer
layer.
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