Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Post 11: project proposal

For my project I would like to study the discourse community known as Twitter.  Social media has become a recent craze due to the advent of the internet as well as the ease and access of inter connectivity between people now.  Whether this be via cell phones, tablets or laptop computers it has become increasingly easy to connect with other people no matter where the location.  Twitter is currently the latest trend in social media and is expected to eventually outgrow Facebook in users.
Using Swales' six characteristics of a discourse community Twitter can be described as such.   The first of these characteristics is that of a common public goal that is broadly agreed upon.  Each different person, group or business that puts themselves on Twitter are all after something different but the main thing that every single person on Twitter does is tries to gain attention or a following of some kind.  The goals are public in that anyone who has a Twitter can follow anyone else who has a Twitter.  Another of these characteristics is that of intercommunication among its members.  With every tweet posted  online each member has the ability to see what any other person has tweeted.  If a person however decides to not make a post private they have the option to send a private message rather than a public post.   The third of the discourse characteristics talks about how the community uses its participatory mechanisms in order to gain feedback.  This can take form in a variety of ways depending on the situation of who talking.  A group such as a news network might ask what questions they should ask in an interview they are going to have later.  A person might just ask for some sort of simple advice on a life situation.  Other people are able to respond to these types of posts  and put in their two cents on the subject.  The fourth of these characteristics talks about different genres a discourse community can have.  When people post things they can take various forms..  Some post in text, others with pictures and some with links and videos.  Each of these different kinds of posts will effect the community in a different way and can be used to convey a certain type of emotion.  Along with genres another characteristic of a discourse community is the use of lexis specific to that discourse.  The most common form of this on Twitter is the hashtag.  After a tweet has been composed a person may put a hashtag at the end followed by a word or short phrase that is related to the post.  What this does is categorizes posts and these hashtags can be searched later to find other information similar to that topic.  Another form of lexis found on Twitter is the use of abbreviations or emotional texts.  In order to convey a certain emotion one must use such words as "LOL" or "LMAO."  Also because there is a 140 character limit people must use abbreviations sometimes to fit all of their text into one post.  The final characteristic of a discourse community is the threshold of membership.  While anyone can join into the Twitter sphere there are only a few of those many people who will gain a large active following of people.
Twitter is gaining popularity among the world of social media and many people are dropping their older forms in order to have more time to spend on this one.  A few people I know including one of my roomates no longer has or uses Facebook and spends him time exclusively on Twitter.  I would like to interview him as well as other friends  who have stayed on Facebook and discuss with them how maybe there can be dual discourses that can possibly overlap.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Collin,

    This is really interesting. I'm excited about this. I like how you show that Twitter does qualify as a discourse community using Swales. Remember that you don't have to be completely constrained by Swales' theory- you can challenge it too. Does the concept of "community" fit Twitter? Or should we think of it and talk about it as a discourse network? I also really like how you pinpoint the hashtag as part of a the specific lexis on Twitter and how you describe how it acts (rhetorically) to classify, organize, and archive data. Further, I think the hashtag would be an interesting point of focus for this study if you wanted to go that direction. You mention some people you might interview but you don't say anything about what texts you could look at in the proposal. Here's an idea: You might compile 2 or 3 interesting hashtags and study the different tweets categorized there to get a sense of how different users interpret and enact the rhetoric of the hashtag.

    Another really interesting point of research you mention is the possibility of examining how discourse in different social media apps overlap.This could be really interesting. You might try to show how different social media apps share a common discourse but also have particular sets of language and genres. This would be a way of extending Johns' "levels of community" theory to social media.

    Can you do both the hashtag and the levels of community? I think so, you might just want to find something specific about facebook discourse. That way you could show common lexis/common genres and then specific genres/lexis for each.

    Good work! This is going to be really good.

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