Suppose you yourself is an algorithm which can sort whatever objects that can be compared pair-wise (playing-cards, CDs, business cards, whatever). You're not actually interested in what these concrete objects are provided you can compare them. Thus you become a generic (here "generic" is used in a broad term, not in C# sense) algorithm.
Generics in .NET help facilitate this particular kind of behavior not only in terms of algorithms (generic functions), but also in terms of generic types (classes, structs, delegates, interfaces).
