Can a medium be a genre? If we randomly replace gender with more general synonyms such as category, class, or group, then the answer is “yes,” as demonstrated by the information architecture of online super retailers like Amazon.com. Amazon breaks down its massive inventory first by medium, such as “Books” or “Movies,” before working incrementally toward a finer degree of granularity. Taking books as an example medium, we can browse by subgenres to find a title in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Adventure. But this understanding of gender as synonymous largely ignores the more formal identification process performed within the established field of gender studies. Frow (2005) provides several structural dimensions to use in genre identification, which include considerations of formal characteristics, thematic structure and content, the physical environment, and the addressing situation. For more established genres, such as the science fiction adventure book, we could easily recognize many of these dimensions and codify common elements together in a genre. However, do these dimensions provide the same ease of identification for emerging classifications of digital media, such as viral videos? Popular misconceptions, especially online, are often quick to describe any collection of related artifacts as a “genre,” and Internet discourse phenomena appear to be no different. As articlecity.com contributor John Heritage tries to explain: Viral video is hard to define, but it's quickly becoming a genre in its own right. A college professor, trying to define poetry, once said this: "Poetry is like pornography." It's hard to define, but you know it when you see it.' Replace 'Viral Video' with 'Poetry' and you have a definition of...... half of the document ...... ipt mentioned in Pierce, D. (9 February 2010). Shock and awe: Viral news is good news. Wired.com. Retrieved February 9, 2010, from http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/shock-and-awe-viral-news-is-good-news/Burgess, J. (2008). “Does all your chocolate rain belong to us?” Viral videos, YouTube and the dynamics of participatory culture. In G. Lovink and S. Niederer, (eds.) Video vortex player: Responses to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, pp. 101-109. Frow, J. (2005). Type. London: Routledge (New Critical Idiom series). Heritage, J. (2009). The viral video is quickly becoming a genre of its own. Articlecity.com. Retrieved February 5, 2010, from http://www.articlecity.com/articles/humor/article_315.shtmlJenkins, H. (2009, February 11). If it doesn't spread, it's dead. Message published at http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html