Discourse communities

Discourse communities, in simple terms is a group of people who are involve in a group with common ideas. In this groups they share ideas with a goal to impact the public. Some groups you can easily join and other groups you must be invited.

     We live in a world full of discourse communities. For example, there’s the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals well known as (PETA). They are the world’s largest animal rights organization. Their goal Is to stop animal cruelty. Another example of a discourse community is a church. Churches main goal is to save the life of people spiritually, help them reach enlightenment. To spread their faith to everyone, spreading good morals and values to the community.

 You get the idea.

     Without being aware of it, we have always been surrounded by discourse communities all of our life starting with schools. How is this possible you might be asking yourself? Well we all experienced different social groups in high school and different kind of clubs. Everyone always wanted to belong to a group in high school, drama club, sports team, Student body or the clique of the popular kids.

     I always wanted to belong in the group of the popular kids but I wasn’t cool enough. Instead I Belonged to the California Scholarship Federation also known in many California schools as CSF.

    CSF is a scholarship society that you had to qualify to join and you had to be invited. You had to be qualified through your academic grades, merit service and citizenship, you also had to be invited by the president/representative of the club. The idea of the club was to recognize academically outstanding high school students who were in the right path towards graduating with honors. According to John Swales article I believe that this scholarship society fits right into the six qualifications of a Discourse community.

My friends reaction when i told them I was asked to join CSF

     According to Swales the first characteristic that defines a discourse community is that the community “has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.” Meaning the club does not just exist to take up your free time but rather has a public goal. The public goal of the club is to motivate students to be academic achievers and expand their knowledge in order to become someone in life and make this a better world. Also, it has goals for parents, to support the student academically to help them achieve outstanding grades. Such students that demonstrate outstanding academic achievements were recognized with a quarterly diploma and a recognition in our newspaper.

    A second characteristic that defines a discourse community Is that it has “mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.” CSF member mechanism of intercommunication was meetings every Wednesday during lunch. In this meetings we had a chance to discuss issues within the program, things we could do to make it better in order to reach out to more students and parents. These meetings also helped us get to know each other on a more personal level.

      “A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback” Is the third characteristic in defining a discourse community. We used to take advantage of the school newspaper to write information of upcoming events with the club or to recognize an outstanding academic student. We had to let the school know of our existence and the things we did to recognize honor students.

    A fourth characteristic that identifies a discourse community is, “A discourse community utilizes and hence possess one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.” Not only did we take up on the genre of the newspaper but we also had member handbooks and flyers specifically made for the group. We also had calendars where it informed us about the next meeting and upcoming events.

    Fifth, “In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis.” The Lexis that us as a society took were the focus in grade point average (GPA), merit service and citizenship.

    Finally, “A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expertise.” In this community system we had President, Secretary, Treasurer, Vice President. Each community needs different levels of members to deal with different cases and issues the society might have instead of one person doing everything. And not just anyone qualified for these positions, you needed at least 2 years in the club in order to apply to the position. You needed the experience and the knowledge of the program and the system we used in order to be considered for any position.

     I know, I’m such a loser for being in the honors program but hey, many people envy that. Especially the popular kids. Finally, I had something they didn’t have, a brain. :P

Opinions matter

Just for kicks and giggles. I mean, what is a blog without any humor right? :)

To be completely honest with you, I have never read an editorial or a JSTOR Daily before. I avoid news… and reading for that matter. If it’s not on Facebook, best believe I have not read it. I like things short and straight to the point. However sometimes you need more space to get a point across. Especially when it comes to expressing an opinion.

When you want to express an opinion you can either go the 100 yards and do some research in order to bring credibility to your opinion. This helps to have a strong argument that will provoke for an action to be taken, like the JSTOR Daily’s, or like editorials, you can focus on just the current event and recent actions that have been taken that helps express your opinion.

We all have an opinion and most of us want our opinions to be heard so why not write about them?

Opinions are a very sensitive subject to many people, especially during the 21^st century where people get offended by even a look. Now imagine the risk you are taking when you publish your opinion for pretty much the whole world to read. While reading both the Op-Ed and JSTOR Daily, I realized that depending on where you publish your opinion it affects the way you must express it.

It is known that the JSTOR Dailies are academic journals that express academic opinions on real life events rich of valuable and credible information do to research within the published article. If its posted in an academic website like the JSTOR, the audience knows that it’s not just someone rambling but rather someone well educated expressing their side on a current event. In knowing that background information of the host publishing the article, it attracts a specific kind of audience that expect a more formal and strongly supported opinion. For example, in the article I read from the JSTOR Daily, Viral Black Death: Why We Must Watch Citizen Videos of Police Violence, the author was well aware of where she was publishing and of her audience that she used rhetorical strategies of persuasion such as research, ethos, pathos, logos in order to express her opinion that also helped her persuade the audience to take action. Fain uses appeals to ethos when she says “as an attorney, African American historian, and scholar of black masculinity, I believe that we have a responsibility to #staywoke and look.” Here she is pretty much connecting with the audience and justifying why her opinion matters. In other words, she is saying “hey I’m not just a random girl giving her opinion but rather I am an Attorney with knowledge on African American history that wants actions to be taken.” Right after this sentence she supports it with her use of pathos saying that “We should acknowledge and absorb the pain captured in the videos, just as antiracist activists bore witness in the past to gruesome photographs of lynching’s.” Here, she is letting the reader know that she wants them to feel the emotion of pain when they are watching the videos of these African Americans getting violently attacked. To support her ethos and pathos she uses logos throughout the article to help her gain credibility that will make the reader think like her and take the action that she’s asking for.

Hopefully I'm making sense and I don't have you feeling like Paris.

On the other hand, Editorials are simpler and definitely shorter. Editorials seemed to me more like an article that in their opinion matter attack a person or a certain group with minimal rhetorical strategies. They pick a subject and take pieces of different current events that partially affect their opinion and make a huge argument that it’s not quite supportive. Like I said, it all depends on the place the article is posted and by who is posted. Like the article I read, Criminal rape cases should not be on a ticking clock, is hosted in a famous newspaper article, The Los Angeles Time, and they have all sorts of audiences. Like professionals, well studied people and none professionals, none well studies people so their articles balance from formal to informal on and off so that it appeals to almost all their audiences in order to get them to take action on their opinion.

Although they take a different format, the Editorials and Academic journals, at the end of the day they have more in common than differences, they both try to express an opinion and persuade the reader to take action.

If I had to choose between feeling more persuaded by either one, I would choose the Academic journal just because it shows more thought put into it and its very supportive that it might even change my way of thinking while reading it. Like Joseph Cashman says in his blog, “Then again, that is just my opinion.”

Internet memes

Being that it’s the 21^st century, everyone has a device that allows them to connect to the internet and interact with the media via Facebook, twitter, Instagram, snapchat etc. If you are in any of these social medias I’m 100% sure that you are aware of the current trend of the internet memes.

Memes are shared all over the media and have made their ways to print. Sometimes at a restaurant of a random bulletin board you might see an internet meme. I know that for me, I see them at work. We have this bulletin board in the office where each week a new meme is posted expressing an idea, a current even or just simply for humor reasons.

Memes have also been going on for a long time. As early as WWI. According to Davison one of the most popular “meme” was the regular happy face :-). Before given the name meme they were known as emoticons. Emoticons were used to “frame content as positive or negative, serious or joking, or any number of other things” (124). The reason this emoticon started was because of “Members who participated on the bulletin-board system at Carnegie Mellon [that’s] would on occasion descend into “flame wars”—long threads of communication that are hostile or openly aggressive to other users” (124). Because people misinterpreted their “humor” they tried to use emoticons to less offend the people. Later the emoticons kept evolving and have become this things that we know now as meme. And until this day sometimes people are still offended.

In the Article “The Language of Internet Memes” Patrick Davison suggest that a successful meme consist of three components. The first one is manifestation. Davison says that “the manifestation of a meme is its observable, external phenomena. It is the set of objects created by the meme, the records of its existence” (123). In other the background story of the meme, its context. The second component is the behavior, “The behavior of a meme is the action taken by an individual in service of the meme” (123). The action the person takes to create the meme what do they do with the picture to make it interesting? What does the picture consist of? And the final concept that Davison suggest that makes a successful meme is the ideal, “The ideal of a meme is the concept or idea conveyed.” (123). What is the idea that you want the meme to express?

One of the internet memes that I’m obsessed with are the “Kermit the Frog” memes. The reason I’m obsessed with this meme is because of the message they express, “shade”. The first line of the meme gives a real life problem and the second line closes with “but that’s none of my business” with the frog drinking a cup of tea. I don’t know about you but this reminds me of when you are gossiping with your friends and you are throwing shade at an event or to another friend. Or it just reminds you of that nosy aunt that “doesn’t like drama” but she is the one that starts all of it.

As Davison expresses the concepts of the meme I realized that this meme fits into the three concepts. The meme manifestation because we know where the meme comes from. It also has a behavior. Each Kermit the Frog meme changes which helps to express different ideas, just the way Davison suggests that a successful meme should be.

I agree with the three concepts that Davison mentions but I also would like to add that the reason a meme is successful is because one can relate to them. Once the meme becomes relatable it becomes memorable just like the authors of “Memes and Affinities” Knobel and Lankshear express in their article.

Throughout their essay they express the idea that it’s a new way of communicating that creates a connection with the audience that it becomes memorable. Maybe to one the meme becomes memorable because of something the picture has like a face expression, colors, movie screenshot or even just the text of the meme.

Some memes have had great impact on people that sometimes you don’t even need the famous lines to be written on the meme because you know the idea that the meme is trying to convey. For example, the meme to the left just shows the image and a small text. Without even needing the famous line of “but that’s none of my business” you already know what the meme is conveying. When you know longer need those phrases in the meme that’s when you know that this meme has accomplished both the ideas of Davidson, Knobel and Lankshearideal “successful” meme.