There is no chicken-or-egg question when it comes to blog entries discussing complex topics, and the research that these entries are referencing. An acceptable definition is almost certainly workable that would state the genre of research as being antecedent to that of the blog entry. Although broader consequences of the research may be illuminated by the entries, the entries themselves give no attempt at adding to the research of the topic at hand. The genre of research doesn’t directly presuppose that it ought to be brought to the masses in layman’s terms, however there is an appreciable need for this translation in order to ease in the understanding of important issues for those who are affected by them but do not understand them.
Just as our genre would not exist without the theoretical existence of research on a specific topic, it would would lose importance if it detached itself from the direct instances — journals, reports, etc. — of this research. By providing both off hand references to names and projects in addition to direct citations, the views of the blogger are kept within the realm of reality and legitimized to the reader. These references fulfill the criteria for the first half of the definition of uptake, and the ability to translate them to high-school-readable levels and digestible analogies fulfills the latter half.
The explicit genres that might follow our genre would be those which exist on various social networking platforms. This is seen in links that allow the reader to subscribe to the blog, or share it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. Another avenue of interaction is a comment section present in most of these blogs. Not only does this help to spread the name of the blog to which the entry belongs to, but it also targets an audience which is most likely to be receptive to educating themselves on the topic (friends with similar interest, typically a younger demographic). I believe an implicit uptake of our genre is also to educate the reader so that they might make changes in their own lives or value systems, in addition to helping the reader to communicate the ideas they’ve read about to friends in their own life.
In our initial draft of our genre model we accounted for the explicit uptake of social media forwarding by including elements for this purpose. Ultimately we chose to remove the comment section and a few other existing uptake related elements as fabricating their existence seemed unimportant.
