Blog post 2: Social media and discourse communities

Jones describes in her article how poets gather on the social medium Twitter. By using retweets and commenting on other poets’ work they post on picture they have created some kind of community. On twitter unknown and known poets can meet and share opinions and ideas about others work. The comments on a poet’s poem can be very useful for them as feedback according to improve their work and develop and continuing on their thoughts on a certain subject. The retweeting is also a good way for poets to “get out there” so other poets and non-poets will become more familiar with their work. Creating communities on social media, such as Twitter, can be leading to great opportunities for such people as poets as an example. There are some living proofs that the power of social media can recognize talents and even lead to great job opportunities for some.  This poet community on twitter is probably what Harris would describe as a “discourse” community. According to Harris’ article “Discourse community” is defined as such; “…the common space shared by its members is replaced by a discursive "forum," and their one-to one interaction is reduced to a system "providing information and feedback." And from taking this definition word by word, this is what Jones describes in her article.

NPR posted an article about the power of the “hashtag”. In this article it describes how a discourse community started by the creator of the hashtag #WhyIStayed. Within this community people started to discuss abuse and divorce. The community of commentators and “hashtaggers” raised this question and got other people interested in it with help of the hashtag. This hashtag became a community for those people interested in this topic. From my own experience I have seen these “hashtag communities” raise and grow with my own eyes. On a smaller level, a wedding hashtag that follows two people getting engaged and then married is an example of a “hashtag community”.

Zammett Ruddy writes in her article about how she took a picture of her kids making a snowman, but when she was about to post the picture she realized that her picture was “fake” and showed her kids smiling and being happy, the complete opposite that the kids had been while building the snowman. The problem she writes about is probably something many people out there face daily. I am one of them. Name any social media, Instagram, twitter, Facebook, the majority of the users of these social medium uses them to create an image of themselves, either for self-purposes or to “show off”. I think this article is very interesting since I honestly catch myself thinking the same thing daily as this mother; “should I post this picture that looks absolutely great, and write about how great this event was even if in real life it isn’t that great?” the author calls this “fakebooking” and I think this is a very interesting term she chooses to use, and also a pretty correct one. I think that fakebooking is a phenomenon in today’s social media based world. I believe that many people have an obsession to be seen as “perfect” and therefore post “perfect” pictures with “perfect” captions on their social media accounts. The author is mostly discussing Facebook in this article, but from my own experiences with social media I think that Instagram is probably the number one medium where most people uses the term “fakebooking” daily. Instagram is about the pictures and “pictures can speak a thousand words” as a Swedish expression says. Instagram users take advantage of the photographing super powers. An ordinary breakfast meal can suddenly look like “the most amazing and fabulous meal ever”. More often Instagram users don’t even write a caption to the pictures they are posting, just letting the picture speak. And this is when the term of fakebooking is becoming even more certain.

I have personally thought about for a long time how fun it would be to make a “behind the scenes” account on Instagram which would only post pictures of other people taking a picture they are uploading to Instagram. I think this would be a fun thing to start, to recognize that the world isn’t perfect and there is always a “behind the scenes” or “the reality” to show. I think starting up an account like this might change people’s perceptions of what perfect is and that things doesn’t have to be perfect all the time. Maybe, hopefully, people would stop pressuring themselves to become so “perfect” in other people’s eyes.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Harris talks about “interpretive communities” and “speech communities”, I think that these two can be found in discourse communities as well, not just in “the life outside the internet”. I think that discourse communities evolve because of peoples obsession in belonging to something. And probably people are looking to join both an interpretive community where they share the same values and beliefs as the other people in the group, and a speech community where they are grouped together with people that are at the same place and time as themselves. An example of a “speech discourse community” I am involved in is for an example “UNL international students community” on facebook. Here I can find people that happen to go to UNL at the same time as me and are international students as I am. I am also involved in an “interpretive discourse community”, for an example my “BEST FRIENDS” private Facebook page, where I feel connected to the people in that community because of our similar values and beliefs.

To just sum this up I do think that the majority of all the people out there in this world that has some sort of societal connection and computer access are involved in many different discourse communities, even if they aren’t aware of it themselves.