Post 10: Discourse Community

As I have stated in my literacy narrative I have always been someone who is involved online in all sorts of different sites and different ways.  The discourse community in which I am involved in that I would like to talk about is that of Twitter.  Twitter is a social media site where people can choose to follow certain people in order to see who or what organization is up to or what they thinking or doing at the moment.  In John Swales' The Concept of Discourse Community he talks about discourses as having a broad set of common public goals. What I have noticed in the way of public goals is that everyone seems to have different reasons why they Tweet what they Tweet but in the end the main purpose I believe is just for interaction.  People want to feel connected to each other and Twitter allows for people to have a metaphoric window into others minds.  In his article Swales also talks about how discourses use certain mechanisms of communication and how they use it for feedback and to provide information.  When someone tweets about something they only have a 140 character to do it.  This causes straight to the point kinds of communication.  Also people can be tagged in tweets in order to make sure that a certain person is more likely to see the post and respond to it.  In many cases people who have more followers will often get more responses especially when something offensive or funny has been posted by an individual, providing feedback from among other Twitter peers.  In addition to this characteristics Twitter also has formed certain genres and lexis among their discourse sphere.  Anyone can be on Twitter but there are three main types of categories that people often follow: friends/family, celebrities and news outlets.  This creates different ways in which people post things.  Family and friends will be much more informal and use acronyms to shorten sentences or express themselves with text such as "LOL" (laugh out loud). Many other celebrities may use the lexical texts as well depending on how what they are known for.  Other choose to be more formal and serious and speak in regular more formal English as the news outlets choose to be.  Swales also talks about how discourse communities have changing memberships.  Social media sites tend to come in and out of "fashion" and people will flock to the "newest" and "better" trend.  There are not really novices and apprentices in this discourse.  Rather its just depends on the interest of people still willing to be a part of it.