“Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been,” in the words of Actor Alan Alda. And that is what why many creative people flock to the seemingly popular subreddit inside Reddit.com, known as FanTheories to to share theories, interpretations and speculation related all types of creative works and to experience a creative place most are unable to say they have been. I too am one of these people who became an active member of this discourse community as it represents my high interest in creative works and combines it with critical thinking and postulating to explore new ideas and bring new life into aging media. However, there is much more to FanTheories than just sharing ideas and hypotheticals …show more content…
According to researcher John Swales within his article: The Concept of a Discourse Community, a discourse community may be defined as a “group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field. (Swales 468)” it is detrimental to understand the inner workings of Reddit. Within professor Bernd Becker’s article: Learning Analytics: Insights Into the Natural Learning Behavior of Our Students, he provides a detailed overview of Reddit.com as “one of the busiest and most diverse social networks on the Internet, (Becker 65)” and specifies more detailed aspects of the community such that: “Registered users called ‘redditors’ can submit links or begin discussions on whatever they choose. The links that are submitted are voted up or down by the millions of other active Reddit users. (Becker 65)” The most important part to understand regarding this is that the number of votes depend the placement on the board which Professor Steven Ovadia remarks on in his article: More Than Just Cat Pictures: Reddit as a Curated News Source. Ovadia extends the ideas of Becker towards the voting process on Reddit but implores his own opinion towards it stating that “Because users vote on content, higher quality content often seems to rise to the top of the page, although that judgment is subjective and obviously excludes the lower-voted content, which is harder to find and compare against. …show more content…
Journalist and Moderator Paul Maplesden provides the value of obeying the rules of a community in his article The Importance of Following the Rules of Online Communities on hubpages.com. He begins by introducing how to provide mutual benefit for oneself and other members, one must “understand what the standards of behavior are, knowing what you can, and can't post, reading frequently asked questions… and more.” Maplesden moves to appeal how valuable it is to listen to the moderators saying that “moderators are the people with authority in the community and are there to look after it and make sure that the rules and guidelines are followed.” To better understand the unwritten etiquette of FanTheories, we can observe the story of Alan provided in Professor Elizabeth Wardle’s article: Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces. Alan was a computer support specialist who did not learn/ choose to write in the ways his humanities department colleagues found appropriate and legitimate and for this he was ostracized and ridiculed by his coworkers. Alan resisted to adapt to the change of his workplace. For instance, his use of email was improper
Accomplishing goals through intercommunication among members of a community is one characteristic that makes up a discourse community. A discourse community has six characteristics such as having a broadly agreed set of goals, a participatory mechanism to provide information or feedback, acquiring a specific level of language, and members with a suitable degree of relevant content. The community that is a community discourse is India. India occupies the greater part of South Asia and consists of twenty-nine states. India is most known for festivals, food, and jewelry. The constitution of India does not give any language the status of national language. So, communication among the people is not easy with twenty-two languages in one country. India consists of diverse ethnic races and groups who strictly follow specific customs. The cultural diversity of the country is what makes up the discourse customs within the community.
A discourse community comprises of a group of people sharing a common and distinct mode of communication or discourse, especially within a particular domain of intellectual or social activity (Oxforddictionaries, 2017). Some of the discourse communities I consider to be a part of, include an Indian joint family, my peer group, high school education in India, the Apple community and education at Pace university.
To be a part of a discourse community, one must be credible, possess factual knowledge and draw on the values of its members to be accepted into the community. At the same time, a person must learn typical ways people in that community communicate and argue. They share a certain genre—type of writing. Members of discourse communities provide information and feedback that are imperative in order for that discourse community to grow. In the following paper, I will discuss three discourse communities and a genre that they typically use: people who read Nutritional Facts religiously, college students, and industrial organizational psychologists.
In his article “The Concept of Discourse Community,” Professor John Swales defines what a discourse community is, following with a list of six different points that a group must align with in order to qualify as a discourse community. These parameters are as follows: “a broadly agreed set of common public goals,” “mechanisms of intercommunication among its members,” the use of “participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback”, use or possession of “one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims”, “some specific lexis”, and “a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise” (471-473).
A discourse community is a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field. According to the criteria conveyed in “The Concept of Discourse Community” by John Swales, Christianity can be considered as a discourse community because of its common goals, medium of communication, participatory mechanisms, specific genres, and its threshold level of members.
Understand the ways that reader and writer wrote in and beyond the university. On way is writing essays about certain discourse communities like the “Persuasive” essay, where I had to write about a discourse community I was part of and how it used writing. It was a challenging essay on the part where I had to explain and give examples since my discourse community was my criminal justice study group. It was hard to describe how writing took place and make it persuasive showing why writing is important to my discourse community.Second is reading different articles that were connected to different discourse communities from each other. And writing a response to the article was great because it makes me think little and look deeper instead of
An example of a discourse community I choose to talk about in this paper is the JPS Nail Salon located near Elvis Presley Boulevard. I recently became a part of this particular discourse community group by volunteering to help out on the weekends. I thought it would be interesting to dig a little deeper as to how discourse community works out as a whole.
A discourse community is defined as a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field. We all belong to multiple discourse communities.To earn a position of a discourse community one must possess accurate knowledge, establish reliability of members to be accepted and learn to persuade other members of the community. The discourse community that I identify with personally and the profession I plan to pursue is the world of film production. However, there are many jobs that need to be done on a film set leading to there being multiple discourse communities within the film industry, what I want to focus on specifically is the DP, otherwise known as the “director of photography”. According to “The Concept of Discourse Community,” by educator and researcher John Swales, a discourse community is defined by six characteristics.
A discourse community is a group of people or communicators who share the same common goals or interests and use different forms of communication to achieve these goals. Some of these forms of communication may range from reading, writing, the use of technology such as blogging and emailing, and even visual art such as painting and drawing. As an English major focusing on the aspect of creative writing, the discourse community I so happened to be associated with is of the English subject. The discourse community of the English literature is made up of many people, genres of literature, and even terms. The discourse community of English literature can be traced back to as early as the year C.658 with the development of Anglo-Saxon literature. Some influential eras of English literature include : Romanticism, Victorian literature, Medieval Theater, Poetry, and the Elizabethan Period. Of course with every discourse community there are a vast number of people who help to make it up. In the discourse community of English some of these people include author and playwright William Shakespeare, author Mark Twain, author and poet Jane Austen , and a slew of famous African-American authors some including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Lorraine Hansberry, and poet Maya Angelou.
A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. John Swales defines a discourse community as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals." The community I choose to identify with is special education. Special education teachers, or aids, really dedicate themselves and their time to others who need special assistance or treatment. The California Department of Education supports high quality educational programs for California’s big student population. According to the ideas from the federal government, the variety of the education working environment is one of the fastest growing areas of the American economy. The importance in understanding this career includes emotional, and physical growth of each student. Working with students who have disabilities can be very rewarding, but it is sometimes emotionally demanding and physically draining. Before stepping into the job of becoming a special education teacher, it is important to understand the patience that is needed in order to work with special children.
When you apart of this fandom discourse community it is way more than about just representing the team you must know the knowledge to be credible, feel the emotion and passion for your team whether they win or lose, and have the logic to prove you are a fan of this team. These are all factors of why this discourse community matters, they all prove how you apart of this community and how people on the outside have come in. The biggest of them all is the everlasting bonds and friendships you create through this community. These bonds can last lifetimes just over the fact you guys share the same favorite team which is why you should care about this discourse community.
Discourse communities are all around us, which can include a sports team, academics, and many others. However today I am focusing on a discourse community that relates to my major, criminal justice. In order for me to understand swales six characteristics I interviewed a homicide detective relating to criminal justice. A discourse community is a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field. A discourse community is defined by six characteristics. The six defining characteristics of a discourse community require a set of common goals, there must also be mechanisms of communications within the community as well as feedback among members. Genre, the fourth characteristic, describing the various methods of output. The last two are terminology, and expertise. In order to really understand that criminal justice is a discourse community, I had to do research, and interview an expert in the field. To be a part of a discourse community, one must be credible, possess factual knowledge and draw on the values of its members to be accepted into the community. At the same time a person must learn typical ways people in that community communicate and argue. They share a certain genre which is a type of writing. Members of discourse communities provide information and feedback that are imperative in order for that discourse community to grow. My interviewee, Carol Mims, is a child homicide detective. She is an alumni here at
For the purposes of this paper, I will be using the criteria that were outlined by John Swales for what classifies as a Discourse Community. Swales said that for a community of individuals to be considered a Discourse Community if must meet six basic requirements. These requirements are that "there are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise" (Swales 224). We will explore these requirements further as we look into whether Reddit fits them or
According to Swales he describes a discourse community as a group of people that have goals, specific vocabulary, values, genres, a specific language, and criteria to get in the group. While this is how Swales describes a discourse community, Erik Borg describes a discourse community as an actively shares goals and communicate with other members to purse those goals. For this paper, I will be describing how my discourse community, a football teams, falls into the description of what Swales describes a discourse community as.
REDO DISCOURSE COMMUNITY Everyone has the same goal in a discourse community, achieving a set goal. Whether it be getting work done or doing something for fun everyone has a goal in a group. The reason why people come together to form a group is usually one they cannot achieve alone. Playing a game alone makes it reasonably boring but with other people involved makes the game more fun.