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Fantheories: The Concept Of A Discourse Community

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“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

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