Be
sure to post the four digit course section at the top of your blog
posting. There is no need to include the ENC 1101 part; Just put the
four digits of the course section. After you post the course number, you
are welcome to give your posting a title if you so choose.
This weeks blog requires you to create an analytical framing lens to help you investigate your community. Consider the authors we have read this semester (and in particular the ones we have read for the current unit). At the top of your posting, you should list the analytical principles of the article you are using as a lens. (Any articles we have read are fair game, but be cautioned, some articles will probably yield more or less effective results). Then you should write a brief paragraph that underscores the analytical lens you are using. When you create your analytical lens, you are not expected to use every principle developed over the course of the article. You should pick an choose some principles that you want to work with.
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For the second section of this prompt, you should consider the data you have collected thus far from the online community you are investigating. Deliver an analysis of your community through the theoretical lens you developed in your opening.What, for example, might reading your community through the lens of Wardle's idea of "identity" allow you to claim about the community? Are there certain episodes within the community's communication that represent identity resistance that could be more thoroughly analyzed? Perhaps you might view the idea of conflict through the lens of Gee who claims that often times the values of varying communities one is a part of can be at odds. Perhaps some of Suler's claims about the psychology of cyberspace can help you make claims about the community you are investigating.
It isn't expected that you have all of your data perfectly organized at this point, but you should start to play with some different theoretical lenses to help you analyze the community.
Your initial posting should be delivered on or before Monday, Oct. 29th, 11:59pm (Eastern Standard Time). You should also print and bring a copy of your blog to class on Tuesday. Note: (if you are in the mixed mode class that only meets on Thursday, please bring your copy on Thursday).
Your response to a peer's posting should be completed by Tuesday, Oct. 30, by 11:59pm (Eastern Standard Time).
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I would like to talk about Elizabeth Wardle’s reading (“Identify, Authority, and Learning to write in New Workplaces” 520-57) and how people write and communicate within that community will affect my framing. James Paul Gee’s reading (“Literacy, discourse, and linguistics” 480-497) is also very informational on the Lexis and mush-fake. I would like to go back to last class when Professor Longhany brought up the John Swales reading and I know that Swales (“The concept of discourse community” 468-478) wasn’t assigned but I read it and I feel that reading has helped me most in understanding what a discourse community was and how to frame a discourse community.
Okay so to begin with Wardle’s reading she talks about having an identity and authority in the community and how you have to have an identity and authority in the community. If you don’t have any sort of authority or identity in the community then you truly aren’t considered part of the community because you cannot take part in the community. To have authority in a community is to be able to be respected by the other members in the community. To have an identity in the community means to be active member of the community that interacts with others in the community. Now I would like to bring up Gee’s reading and talk about how people interact and comprehend what other people are saying within the community. Gee is big on the language and how people in the community will view your grammar. Some communities, based off their language, will either care or not care about your grammar. Gee also brings up the term mush-fake, this is where people fake being in the community just to say that they are a part of it. These people really aren’t welcome in the communities and I am going to see if I can find and mush-fakers in the community that I am analyzing. Swales is strong on the communication and language or Lexis that is spoken too, which to me is one of the biggest factors of the community. You may be able to get the jest of the community but you won’t be able to completely understand the whole community until you understand the Lexis of the community. For example, doctors have their own words that they will use instead of words that people not on their discourse community (people who are not doctors) would understand, like Cranial instead of head. So when I am framing my discourse community I am going to look at the set of broad goals which every community has, I am going to try to analyze the Lexis (how they communicate and what they say). Finally I am going to try to analyze the genres of the community and if the lexis is different in the different genres then I shall analyze that too.
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So before this blog posting I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do my discourse community on but I have decided to do it on Disney food blogs because everybody loves food and everybody loves Disney too. Every time I’ve been to I have always enjoyed the food so why not investigate what I enjoy. So to really begin, I am going to describe the community first. There is an initial posting on some topic and then in the comments is where the communication really happens. So the common goal is to share the delicious foods around Disney World and Disneyland. There is one main person who has all of the authority (Wardle) and makes all of the initial postings, as far as I know, and they hold the main authority. That person makes the community open to anyone who wants come in, join and share their love for Disney food. So far through all of my research I cannot find any particular Lexis that is not hard to understand or comprehend (from Gee and Swales pieces on language). There are a few words that may be a little hard to understand but that is because it is a type of food or how a type of food is prepared, in my actual paper I will go in depth on some of these words. When people are communicating everybody is usually kind and courteous because you don’t want to get kicked off plus who could be rude over food. It’s hard to tell when people are mush-faking on the blog because it is over the internet but if people are mush-faking at least they are doing it in a positive manner. There are tons of different genres posted each day. On the blog there are different categories based off of what type of food you want, what characters you want your food to be based off of. On the blog there aren’t just food genres but there are also food related items genres. For example, a recent posting was for Star Wars food related items which included cookie cutters, ice cube makers and bottle openers. In my actual paper I will go more into depth on the main man (or woman) who runs the blog, the community, their language and all the different types of genres.
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ReplyDeleteEach article that we have recently read in class has given different perspectives on discourse and the individuals involved with it. A couple analytical principles that I feel are applicable to my online discourse are Gee’s definitions of Discourses and how one is apprenticed into the Discourse; Wardle’s representation of signs of authority and use of lexis; and Suler’s theories about online vs. not online identities.
I believe that these are some of the most useful aspects of the readings that can be beneficial to my analysis. Gee defines Discourses right from the beginning and states that it is a saying-doing-being-believing combination; in the online discourse that I am studying, this definition fits perfectly and can help me further explain the happenings within my community. Gee also discusses how one is apprenticed into the Discourse. When I first became a part of this community, I had to be apprenticed in and shown how things worked. As I began to analyze my community, I learned that without someone showing you the ropes, it is very hard for an outsider to understand and become a part of the community and the discussions that take place. Wardle also touches on social standing within the community; in order to be apprenticed into the Discourse, there has to be some sort of hierarchy (whether is spoken or unspoken.) Wardle talks about authority within the community and how it affects everyone as a whole. Different aspects of my community attribute to the social hierarchy that exists; many of these things also tie into some of theories that the other authors of the articles bring up (i.e. Gee’s analysis of grammar use) and can all be linked back to something else. The use of lexis (as Wardle calls it) also attributes to how successful one is within the discourse; however, without the basic understanding of the jargon used, one cannot understand most of what we are saying anyway. (It’s a complicated process.) Suler’s ideas about the online identity are also difficult to explain. It is quite true that the individuals in my community have a different persona online than they do in face-to-face discussions; however, I already know that giving evidence for that will be a challenge considering I do not know most of these people face-to-face.
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With the data and evidence I have collected thus far, I can make some claims about my online community. Because we are a Twitter community, our discussions and “actions” (what we do and then tweet about) are fast paced. One already familiar with the community can keep up without being confused. However, new individuals must be “apprenticed in” as Gee brings up. Just as I was apprenticed in, others are too. The acceptance one feels within the community is directly connected to how they behave; if one acts like they don’t know what they are doing, one will receive treatment as such.
The way that people communicate in the discourse also has a large significance; it can be connected to Gee’s definition of Discourse as a saying-being-doing combination and Wardle’s explanation about lexis and the social authority. For instance: Typing full sentences is not appropriate; short run-ons are more widely accepted. There is no “rule” for this, but it is more of an understood concept. As long as you are grammatically correct with word usage (there, their, and they’re, and etc.) then you have no problems. Punctuation is almost never used, unless in extreme cases OR tweets that serve a higher purpose (making a point, addressing a “superior,” etc.) Instead, basic tweets are (more often than not) punctuated with abbreviations such as jfc (Jesus f***ing Christ), idk (I don’t know,) or omg (Oh my God). The emotion behind the tweet will also have some significance on the way it is typed; excited tweeters will not be able to type full words / coherent sentences most of the time. For example, if someone just won tickets to a concert, it would most likely look like this: omGH I THINK I JUST WN TICKET SIHAI CANT WHATAtj mONG. This type of tweeting expresses the emotion that one has as well as communicated what just happened. Many tweeters, either also excited or happy for that individual, would most likely respond to that tweet with: omG IM YELLING HOW ???? BUT CONGRATZ.
Communicating and typing in these ways serve multiple purposes: basic communication, showing how well versed you are in the ways of the community, communicating emotion, and even personality.
This is just some of the basic analysis that I have done, but as the end of the semester draws near, I will have more to share.
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“Identify, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces” by Elizabeth Wardle will help me frame how people use their authority to identify himself/herself within their community. I will also like to pull from “The Psychology of Cyberspace” by John Suler to help frame my community. His arguments are similar to Wardle’s but I would like to expand on my community using his theory of disinhibition and the different types that a person can be.
Speaking first of Wardle’s theory of having an identity in a community means actually being a part of the community. As well as having authority in the community means being well known throughout the community. Upon reading her article I think she gives off the idea that you have to have identity to have authority, but I beg to differ and believe you should have authority in order to establish your identity. I have switched her theory in my mind because anyone and everyone has an identity whether they know it or show it, but unless your identity means something to others and you put it out there so others will notice, it may as well be a thing of the past or personal secret that you keep to yourself. Establishing your authority is making yourself known and making a voice for yourself. Once you put yourself out there and give people a reason to listen and follow you then you are establishing your identity. People are not going to listen to and follow you based solely on the fact that you have a username and profile picture; however, what your biography and material on this profile say will give viewers an idea of what type of authority you produce. An authority will also set you apart from the people who are making a difference. I will use Suler because he gives a point that everyone has an identity in the online world, or cyberspace. I would like to use his theory of disinhibition because it basically supports Wardle’s point of identity and his point that everyone has an identity, whether the identity is true or false. The theory of disinhibition has the meaning that online people are more likely to create a false identity because people are not able to tell if it’s a fake personality as long as it makes an impact and is interesting to follow. After analyzing the points of Wardle’s and Suler’s articles it is safe to say that a majority of my framing will be based on how individuals can change when the internet is sitting in front of them and how they can form into new identities and personalities. Analyzing someone’s identity or multiple identities in different situations can result in an overflow of information.
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I have chosen the online community, cooks.com. It is website where cooks of course share recipes of all kinds. I came across this community about two years ago when I started my own baking business. I would often go on Google to get an idea of how to create my own version of certain recipes and most of the time I would be directed to that website. After countless times being directed to cooks.com and using ideas from members of the community I created an account so I would not be limited to the amount of information that I could use for my own business. The community does not just consist of random people sharing different recipes. There are articles on different cooking methods, health tips, and alternatives to different dishes. The data I have collected so far entails conversations users have had on different recipes that were popular at that time and how user reacted to an alternative to certain foods. Wardle’s and Suler’s identity theories can be applied to how users act to different articles and recipes on the website. Also I can frame how different users substitute different ingredients in recipes for example a woman in her fifties may use Crisco when baking chocolate chip cookies, where as a young mom may use butter, but personally I prefer to stick to the other and less healthy method of Crisco. I do not usually see negative comments on this website because users just give suggestions on how they would change something or comment how they tried the recipe and it came out great. A negative comment my appear under a article about health tips and someone does not agree.
0M08
ReplyDeleteTo help me investigate my community I will be using James Paul Gee's term "Discourses" as an analytical framing lens. I will be investigating a non-dominant discourse which is a secondary discourse that brings solidarity with a particular social network.
According to Gee, Discourses with a capital D are ways of being in the world that comes with the right instructions on how to act, talk, and often write to take on a certain role. It focuses in writing-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations rather than language or grammar. As an analytical lens, I will be focusing on the certain roles that people take on using this website and it can be seen by the way they act , what they post, and what they value. I won't go into the belief system here. Gee talks about how language is a term that can be misunderstood as it is mostly always linked to grammar. In the online community, you don't need perfect grammar to fit in you just need the right language because there is a unique form of language that one must use to communicate in order to fit in with everyone using the website. I will be analyzing the type of language used in my online community.
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I am investigating the online community of Flowd which is a social network for music lovers. This is a place where you can search for your favorite artists and connect with them by following them. This is not a place where you can brag about your social life or talk about all the moods you are in at any given time of the day. The value system of this website is definitely different for people who use it but it all revolves around music. Some people are new upcoming artists trying to get their names out there so they are using this online community to get connections with everyone. Others are just on the community because they want to know all details about new songs and upcoming gigs of their favorite artists. People from all over the world use this community. People form an identity based on the artists that they choose to follow and what genres of music that they are interested in. Communication can be seen through the status updates that anyone posts and the comments that come back in response to it. You can tell that this online community is made for a younger crowd by browsing the users. Although there are many genres of music to choose from with plenty of artists within those genres, this online community seems to cater mostly to people who love trance or electronica. This type of music is becoming very popular now and so the trance/electronica artists seem to have the most authority on this community because they have the most followers. The language that each artist uses on their own page differs greatly from others. The ones that have numerous followers post a lot more updates because they know that people want to hear what's going on with them, while the newer artists with less followers have to be careful with what they post because they don't want to lose the small crowd they gave due to the fact that they don't have as much literacy as the big artists.
I think your idea of using Gee's concept is very interesting. I like how you said that you weren't going to tie beliefs into peoples being in this community. Your chose to do the Flowd community seems like it is going to be interesting. I am not familiar with it but it seems pretty cool. I like how you said that the followers have to be careful with what they post because they don't want to lose small crowds due to being illiterate. I believe that can be a huge factor when it comes to talking to people online.
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The lens that I will be using to analyze my online discourse community will be framed from the articles we have read during this unit. James Gee’s text will help to distinguish Discourse and the smaller discourses that make up this community. Also, Elizabeth Wardle’s text about identity and authority in communities will help me explain the different roles of members in the community that I will be analyzing. The last text, Suler’s, will help me to analyze persona’s and identity in the community and how they create themselves.
In Gee’s text he talks about different discourses and how they influence people’s views. The lens I am viewing the community through will help view how you become a member of this community and how you are enculturated into the secondary discourse. Gee also mentions dominant and non-dominant discourses which I will review in my community to find if a dominant discourse is obtainable. I would also like to view the community through Gee’s view of Literacy, “The mastery of or fluent control over a secondary Discourse.” To determine if people in the community are actually fluent or if they are “mush-faking.” Finally, I would like to see if apprenticeship occurs within the community, where members learn the literacy through the community by being placed within it, rather than taught it.
Elizabeth Wardle talks about authority and identity of members in communities. She talks about resisting or conforming to the aspects of the community as creating the persona for yourself and how the community views you. In my community I am going to view different members and how they interact in the community, whether they conform or resist; then see how other members react to these members. Also, I would like to analyze how authority is gained in the community: Is it given? Does it have to be established? Does it have to be maintained?
Suler’s text will help me to analyze members of the community to see how they identify themselves. If I am able to interview a member of the community I will be able to see if they are transparent in their identity online in the community and in real life.
These different principles are just a start for the various aspects of the community that I can address, as we completed in class I have a list of questions related to these three author’s articles that will help view the community in an analytical lens.
Part 2:
ReplyDeleteThe data that I have collected about my community thus far has led me to make some claims about it. To begin with, I have gained some insight about identity and authority in the community. The community I am analyzing is an “image sharer,” Imgur. People can upload pictures while others comment on them. In this community, identity and authority can be gained in many ways. The easiest way some sort of authority is gained is; if you are the uploader of an image you are the “OP” or “original poster” this gives some entitlement that you are the person this image came from. Other ways authority is gained is through Notoriety of the members. Identity is gained through your interaction with the community and its members. The community has a vague template of its interactions and if you stray outside it, you may be criticized by other members; but if you follow this template, there’s a chance that you may be praised by other members and your notoriety increased.
0m08
DeleteI like how you incorporated Gee, Wardle and Suler into your response to anazlyze your online community rather than just one of the authors. This broadens your lens. I've never heard of this online community before but it sounds very interesting to observe. I got a good sense of how identity is created through your online community which is by pictures and communication is through comments. Have you observed any criticism on the community?
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ReplyDeleteHow does the Discourse affect writers? Everyone is raised differently. From different background and time, we are different thinkers and writers. Discourse with a capital D is just that, how everyone is situated in their seat before they sit behind their writing utilities.
Is there a Discourse clash between writers? If so, how do they resolve their differences? Generally, diversity is a good thing. However, diversity can sometimes cause disagreement. I’m going to be looking for disagreement between the writers due to their differences in their Discourse. And if I find them, I will find a trend to how the Discourse’s differences are disputed.
How does the community accept the Discourse compare to another community? I’m going to be analyzing a community of writer who, I’m assuming, have a similar Discourse. However, they’re Discourse might not be efficient in another community.
I’m going analyze a game blog call League of Legion. It’s one of the most popular games right now. Basically, people from every continent are playing this game. They are all group in their continent, but if you really want to, you can join and play in another continent too. Assuming that they don’t do that, I’m going analyze North American literacy and their Discourse (Hopefully just the English literate). I know how Spanish is becoming a secondary language in North American’s games. People communicate in Spanish and their Discourse too would be different, very different, from English literate Discourse
The blogs I read on League of Legion was extremely confusing. I play a little bit of the game and it was hard for me to follow. I can’t imagine a person with no knowledge about the game reading the blog. The players and writing on the blog often have dispute about basically everything. The argument never ends and it often brings new arguments. They were many bloggers who were self-righteous. I would quote them but they make no sense unless you play the game. However, I can quote how confusing it is, but that would be pointless.
ReplyDeleteI’m assuming the players must have at least couple hundreds of hours playing the game. The bloggers use names and notations I never heard of before. I often have to refer to the game and make a conclusion to what they are trying to say. Referring from my first question, I can conclude that the players and bloggers are very well inform and probably competitive. The competitive atmosphere is probably why they argue so much too, second question. Like I said before, most of their arguments are left unsolved because the characters people use are all preferences. Just because someone is good at a character in the game, doesn’t mean everyone can use that character and be as good. Due to this, they often have debates about who can easily take out who. If someone has a solution, he usually get bomb on and someone else brings up a new solution. The cycle goes round and round.
My third question asks me to compare this community of players to another community. My first assumption of this community was cooperative but I was totally wrong. It was chaos. Very few people agree in a certain thing. So the Discourse of the community makes it fine for people to argue and bash on each other. It’s a very open and accepted community. The only problem is, can you follow what they are saying. Comparing this to another community of games or work blog, people would be a lot nicer. In the League of Legion community, people use their “Primary Discourse”. They say what they want to say rather than really considering others. In other communities, “Secondary Discourse” would be more preference. You would have to speak formally and be conscious of what you’re saying to another person or people. This might be to make money or be fond to the group. But this community, the blog is use for a battle field and stating their opinion without consequences. This makes a big different in the communication in this community than other communities.
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Analytical principles: Gee's Discourses
Saying(writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations
-Connects with Suler's discussion of online identity
-Connects with Swales discourse community characteristics of "common public goals" and "participatory mechanisms"
-Connects with concept of "online filter bubbles"
Gee's concept of Discourse is described as "saying(writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing" combinations that make up "identity kits" that "integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities” that help us play the correct social role. So, Discourse is made up of what a person says(writes), how they act when saying it, who they are in the community and the attitude they present, and the values and beliefs they hold. Suler discusses online identity and I will keep in mind the anonymity that allow an identity to emerge that may not in offline settings. Swales discusses characteristics of discourse communities, such as "common public goals," which are goals among the people of a community that may be formal and written down or may just be implicit. He also discusses "participatory mechanisms" which are the ways one can participate in a community to "provide information and feedback." Connected with Swales ideas are online filter bubbles, as discussed by Eli Pariser in a TED talk, which are "bubbles" people can become trapped in that keep the information they want to see or are interested in "inside" the bubble, and things that do not appeal to them are kept "outside" the bubble.
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The online community I have chosen is a one within Reddit: the US politics subreddit (reddit.com/r/politics), which I will be referring to as /r/politics. It's self-explanatory; people discuss US politics. Using Gee's Discourse as a framing mechanism, I will start with the saying(writing) part of the "identity kit." Writing is to be clear and understandable, free of grammatical errors, and contribute to the conversation. There are some explicit rules regarding writing on /r/politics, such as "please do not editorialize the titles of your links," "please do not use ALL CAPS," and "please do not post users' personal information." Others, such as avoiding grammatical error, are implied by Reddit as a whole; grammatical errors are almost always pointed out and corrected.
"Doing" on /r/politics consists of reading and posting content, usually news articles, or self posts (text posts written by the user), reading and posting comments on content, and voting on content and comments. On Reddit, there is what is called an "upvote/downvote" system. A user can upvote content or a comment if they like it or feel it contributes, and they can downvote if they don't feel it is contributing. The upvote/downvote system is supposed to be used for deciding whether the content is relevant, not if someone likes or dislikes it, but often users will downvote unfavorable opinions even if they are contributing to conversation. This flaw in upvoting and downvoting is where I make the connection to online filter bubbles. The information the community wants to see will remain on top, while content that is unfavorable and varying from a popular opinion is downvoted and buried. The upvote/downvote system, as well as just posting and commenting, directly relates to Swales "participatory mechanisms" of a community, as this is a way of providing information and feedback in the community.
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"Being" on /r/politics would first consist of being a user of Reddit, coined "Redditor," and then also a user of /r/politics. The being is the social identity assumed. It is agreeable that users of /r/politics are all assuming an identity of just that...a user of /r/politics. Social identities can become complex as we view how they can vary, however. Some commenters may become popular because of favorable opinions they are able to express clearly. Others may be known as the troublemakers or simply ones with a usually unfavorable opinion among the community. "Karma" is a concept that further complicates the social identities. A user earns "link karma" for the net amount of upvotes/downvotes on the content they post, and "comment karma" is earned for the net amount of upvotes/downvotes on user's comments. Karma may potentially be viewed as a sort of "social status" on Reddit, but I have not observed anywhere on Reddit where a user's existing karma has been used as a sort of prejudice against them (i.e. "You currently have 5 link karma, therefore we hate you and you don't belong"). Karma can be reflective on how one is participating on Reddit; however, it must be kept in mind that karma is not limited to /r/politics and a user can earn karma anywhere on Reddit.
Values and beliefs as a user on /r/politics seem to be easy to pick out. /r/politics is full of left-leaning political discussion. You will not find many who have predominantly "right-wing" values or will identify as a Republican. Unsurprisingly, Obama is the man of choice for the fast-approaching election. Also unsurprisingly, based on looking at the front page of /r/politics right now, most links are about Romney and viewing him in an unfavorable light, or about Obama and his potential re-election. It is also very obvious that elections are of importance to the users of /r/politics. Just to further illustrate, on the top of /r/politics right now, a header says "Only 8 days until the election." Once the election results are out, I have no doubt that /r/politics will be in either a celebratory mood, or covered in headlines about how we're screwed if Romney ends up elected, along with conspiracies about voting fraud and whatnot. Now, these are the values and beliefs of the users we see on the top of /r/politics. However, you can't help but wonder where the varying opinions are at, if they are buried, or if they simply do not exist much on this subreddit because they know the overwhelming majority and the upvote/downvote system will keep them out of the light anyway.
Gee's definition of Discourse gives a lot to work with to understand user's identities in /r/politics, and I'm able to connect with other material we have covered to create a purpose for my digital discourse ethnography project and support a claim...something that I don't think I've got quite yet, but should soon emerge.
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ReplyDeleteWardle Analytical Principles:
Identity
Engagement
Imagination
Alignment
Authority
I’m going to use Wardle’s “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces” as my analytical framing lens. Wardle says identity is formed by the various discourses and sign systems around you. Wardle says that identity changes all the time and is constantly formed. Engagement is defined as a “common enterprise” where newcomers and old-timers can connect and work together. Alignment is the negotiation of perspectives, defining visions, and the search for common ground. Authority is also continuously negotiated, like identity, it is constantly changing. Wardle says that authority can just as easily be withdrawn as it can be given or earned. Wardle describes imagination as a process of expanding self by transcending time and space and creating new images of the world and self.
The online community that I am analyzing is Twitter. Wardle describes identity as being formed first before authority, she says that identity is constantly being created in a community. I agree with Wardle’s theory because on twitter people create their profile and they decide what they are going to post about when they make a twitter. Many twitter users who have a lot of followers gain authority because of their identity. Some of the users I have seen post all funny tweets while others post only inspirational quotes. On twitter everyone has a different identity that they create based on their posts. Authority is gained by the twitter users themselves, someone who has absolutely no followers can turn into the most popular person on twitter with one single post. From our reading “ Anatomy of a Trending Topic” you can see how a random twitter user that used the website to communicate with her friends turned into the most popular topic on twitter within a few minutes. There are people who started using twitter when the website was in it’s first year and they have become famous by posting things that everyone can relate. For example, a user named @Wizdom posts things like “Don't complain about something that you can actually do something about” and “Don't judge someone until you know them.” This user has over one million followers and no one actually knows who this person is. They aren’t a celebrity or famous athlete; they just gained a lot of followers and authority over time. Wardle would say that the engagement in this community is build by twitter itself. The social networking site brings together people from all different corners of life. Alignment is present on twitter, however it isn’t necessary for members of this community to change or adapt their views because of the people using twitter. There are thousands if not millions of users on twitter who share your views and opinions. You can personally create your timeline by following certain people. Once you follow a few people you are instantly joined with their group of followers. This creates a community where you don’t need to align yourself with others. Imagination is definitely present on twitter, users can create themselves and be who ever they want to be on twitter. You can also create a world that is whatever you want it to be, just by following different people.
Blake Anderson
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Grant Davie:
Audience – The audience of this online discourse community is a targeted audience. If consists of everyone but the main group to reach are those who actually own and use longboards.
Rhetor – I am conducting an interview with the creator of a Facebook group about longboarding here at UCF. I want to understand his exigencies and the meaning of the community to him.
discourse – The situation that’s the writer is addressing to accomplish something.
Exigence – The problem or the need of the situation; one, the need to make money, or two, the want to fit into a community of people who share the same interests as you.
James Paul Gee:
Discourse – This online discourse community contains an “identity kit” which is easily recognizable within the community and its writings.
Joseph M. Williams:
Error – Refers to a set mistakes that a writer makes regarding syntax and the mechanics and conventions of writing.
Pages 463-465:
Enculturated – How new members become adept at the culture/community
Activity Systems – The common goal or project of the community
For this paper, I am going to write on the online discourse community of longboarding. This community is a very personal and many times informal community in places such as Facebook groups and forums. Grant Davie’s analytical concepts are easily related to these places regarding the informality of them. The exigence of many members of the community is to simply make new acquaintances or be involved in a community where other people share the same interests. In different areas of the community such as brand name website, the exigence is to make money as a business. However, even though these two areas are on different sides of the spectrum, they carry the same audience and personal tone of writing.
This tone also relates the James Paul Gee’s idea of an “identity kit” that comes along with a Discourse. Most of the people in this community, or the parts of it that I am exposed to are amiable and welcoming, whether they are corporate business men, or a local long boarder just trying to find some buds to cruise around with. This persona makes it very easy for new members to be enculturated with the society. As mentioned before the reason, or activity system, the common goal of the community,
could be to make new friends and learn more about the target subject, so who wouldn’t want more members in the community who could fulfill this goal?
ReplyDeleteBecause of the informal nature of the community and overall general atmosphere, errors within writing are usually disregarded. In the Facebook group about longboarding that I am a part of, someone could write a formal business proposal that is notarized, or could just write “YO WHO WANTS TO CRUISE?! HMU.” Either way, the audience understands the rhetors exigence and will respond without much questioning.
Another lens that I wanted to view the community through is the use of visual types of communication. Pictures and videos are commonly shared within this community for a multitude of reasons. Also, the results of the writing within the community results in the interaction of members face to face; this is an aspect of this community that I do not believe many other communities contain. I believe there is a good amount of analytical potential within these two features of the community.
Through my research and interview, I can concur that the specific aspects of this community I am focusing on are, mostly, local and informal. The obvious background of the exigence and atmosphere is to be friendly and make friends. The act of longboarding for many is an act of relaxation and hanging back; this same attitude is carried on throughout the communication. The initial goal of the site has also expanded and members are posting pictures of what they have done to their boards and also their late night adventures with friends. Even corporate sites such as www.loadedboards.com hold a modern and urban feel to them.
Through Davie’s eyes, he would realize that the rhetor is not the person who creates the sites or groups, but anyone who takes the initiative to communicate to an audience of local dozens or national thousands. Their exigence is to be enveloped by the longboarding community and others who are in it as well. Gee and Williams’ principles relate to the rhetor and their mode of communication with an “identity kit” that lacks the constraints of grammatical error. Visual concepts of this community such as videos and pictures also reveal a sense of further communication or physical interaction.
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ReplyDeleteThe lens I will use come from a few articles we have read. I found two that really stuck with me and helped me in the community I researched. Elizabeth Wardle's text about identity and authority came up when thinking about the lens I was going to use and Suler's article on identity in the community. These will help to break down and analyze the missionary community I chose to follow. To notice the identity which was taken, where the authority lies, and the persona of the bloggers and the site.
Wardle explains the identity and authority of the people in the community, and how to spot them. In the article she explains how you create your own appearance in the community. Whether its through your profile picture, how you speak, or your opinions on things you like or don't like. In the community I'm following I'm going to break down the identity of a few of the members and find their authority on the site. Who is given authority or who takes it. I will determine whether they conform to the site.
Ill use Suler's article to breakdown the identity's as well. I can try to contact member or see if they have their own site where I can follow them as well. Ill use that information to see whether they exemplify the same persona when talking on both sites.
The principles of identity are very important when discovering the members of a site and what they're about. I can discover the purpose and the drive of the site. Follow whether they stick with the same identity in all their blogs and how relaxed the discourse is.
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When viewing through the lens of Wardle's idea of identity I discovered that in my community they broke it down into different countries. I followed the Bunnel's blog which was really interesting. They showed pictures of their country and them hanging around the town. They shared videos and sites that answered questions they were being asked. They spoke about the message they gave or places they traveled. Its really easy to see their identity through the picture but the words aren't casual they're more informative information written formally.
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ReplyDeleteI'm planning on talking about Gee and how he explains the authoritative figure and how the primary discourse affects the secondary discourse. I'm also going to use Wardles's ideas of newcomers in the discourse community.
Gee makes some points that I think I can use while analyzing my particular discourse community, which is a food blog. I want to know how the authority figure is recognized and why. Are there specific terms used in the community that the average person wouldn't understand, and if so what are they? I'd also like to find out if there is a secondary discourse for any of the members and how the food blog affects it. Or maybe the food blod is their secondary discourse. Wardle makes me want to investigate how the newcomers align with the community. Do they have to post their own recipie? Do the authority figure(s) have to comment or rate on the newcomer's recipie?
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So far I've noticed that there is one member who consistently comments on recipies and who gives their own recipies frequently. This person is recognized as an authority figure because they often give their opinion and share new ideas. She has said that she knows she has a lot of grammatical errors, but that's because she believes she's a certain type of blogger who rushes through just to get the idea out before she loses it. Afterward she just doesn't have time to proofread it, which tells me she's either a mom or has a full-time job of some sort. Other members just give simple comments on recipies such as "What a great idea!" Some give comments that are helpful like "When I tried this I substituted ground turkey instead of ground beef for a healthier version."
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ReplyDeleteKyle Michalski
I will be using the articles we have read over the past several weeks to analyze my Discourse community. Gee’s description of Discourses and also how most people are apprenticed into the community are relevant to my online discourse. Another analytical principle that will help me is Wardle’s description of identity and authority in Discourse communities. I will also use Suler’s article to further investigate identity. A saying-doing-being-believing combination, this is how Gee describes Discourses. These are all things that people do when they belong to a certain Discourse. That means the faster I learn these parts of my Hospitality Management Discourse, the easier it will be for me to analyze and take part in the community. In several communities you have someone “show you the ropes”. This is called being apprenticed. The person who is babying me into my Discourse community is my hospitality management teacher. He has been a huge help and is showing me several communities/blogs that I can join to further myself in this career field. Establishing your authority goes hand in hand with establishing your identity in your community, or at least that how I interpreted Wardle’s “Identify, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces”. Showing that you are interested and have positive feedback to give to your community will give you a good identity and eventually lead to you have authority and respect from your peers in your community. Suler talks about different types of identities in his work and this is going to help me get where I want to be in my Discourse Community.
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Kyle Michalski
I have finalized what I want my Discourse Community to be, now I just have to find a blog or group pertaining to my topic. My topic is hospitality management. I choose this because This is the career I am planning on doing for the rest of my life. By getting involved in these Discourse Communities I will be able to get my face out there and maybe land some job opportunities. I want to join a community where there isn’t one person who is control, and that anyone can bring up discussion. Hopefully, there will be a certain of lexis. I plan on joining more of a professional blog, so spelling and the way you talk will come into factor. My community will mostly be about improving the industry and other things as well. I will be able to have authority and hopefully this will make me stand out more then other people on the blog.
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The discourse community that I am focusing on is called The Poetry Sanctuary. In order to analyze this piece, I am going to use Elizabeth Wardle’s article “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces”. I am choosing to use her analytical lens of identity because I feel that perfectly suits analyzing a poetry community. Wardle explains in her piece that when you enter a new workplace you must adjust to their conditions. You must speak the way they do, and interact in the same manner. If you fail to adjust to these conditions then you will not thrive in the environment. You must understand your role in that environment and act accordingly. An important point that she examines through Alan is his writing. If you do not know how to appropriately address your environment and embrace their style of writing you will be seen as an outcast and may even leave.
Through this analytical lens of identity I wish to see how you would fit into this poetry community. In this community you are expected to bear all your emotions, well, if you do not feel comfortable and welcomed in the community you will feel uncomfortable and not want to share your poetry. It will display how people interact with each other and how you feel as a novice entering into this community. Through this lens I will be able to see what purpose the Poetry Sanctuary serves for its users. Also, it will show me what conditions the community has in order for someone to fit it, and why someone would feel as though they don’t fit in.
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In analyzing The Poetry Sanctuary through the lens of Wardle’s “identity” frame, I have learned many things. On the opening page of the website, it states “Where thoughts and opinions freely roam”, this displays that if you are uncomfortable with sharing your emotions and thoughts, that this is not the community for you. In order to fit in with a community, you must adjust to their conditions and if you’re not in tune with your emotions or want to keep their private than you will be unable to fit into this community, thus feeling like an outcast. Also, I noticed that when I first entered the website, I could not enter unless I was a registered user. This displays that the website is confidential. This community is focused on being a community and making you feel like you are part of something, and their way of doing so is by not opening it freely to the outside world. You can also offer feedback to different people’s poetry. By giving the option of feedback, this shows that the community encourages improvement for their users. Users must adjust to the openness of this community and willingness to take critiques about their poetry in order for them to feel welcomed and receive the most benefits from being enthralled within The Poetry Sanctuary.
The lens that I wish to use is that of Elizabeth Wardle in her reading “Identify, Authority, and Learning to write in New Workplaces”. In the reading she explains identity and how it builds from your surroundings, the different discourses and sign systems. Authority is similar to identity in the way that it is bestowed by institutions and can also just as easily be withdraw by that same institutions or its members. This does go great with the community I am researching because through this I am able to easily look for that authority by either the way they may portray themselves in simple posts or pictures as well as their way of thinking or expressing themselves and who the wish to reach. Through this reading I was also introduced to the layers that produce that identity that will be useful in my research, those layers include engagement and it is defining a common enterprise that rookies and old-timers pursue together for the development of interpersonal relationships. The other layers include imagination which deals with the process of expanding and alignment which the act of finding a common ground in your environment. A concept that is also mention is that of discourse and it is mention by Gee who explains that what defined our identity is the values, beliefs, and our actions that we posses and how we express ourselves. Suler explains different concepts but one that I can relate to is that of making a fake identity online because of that sense of anonymity and how when people get a grasp of the concept, we tend to feel powerful and make ourselves seem someone we could possibly want to be.
DeleteIn my community I see that it is open for everyone around the globe and because of that it could either be more difficult to spot an authority or more simpler and identities came be translated through their likes. The concepts mentioned above can definitely allow for a better understanding in my community and allow me to spot things like identity through the layers Wardle explains or be more understading by the ideas set by Suler and how the psychology of cyberspace works.
I investigating a live chat that take close when a show airs on TV. To be more specific I am going to take part in an online chat for The Bad Girls Club that airs on the Oxygen channel. The live chats occur during the TV Show and also on Twitter. You can chat and tweet during the show and hash tag it as #BGBC9. Certain tweets are taken and put on the show when they play the re run for the show. I find it interesting to the different types of things that are pointed out by the audience that I never notice the first time around. Twitter is just a use of way to make comments about the show since the live chat sessions cant be shown on TV. I plan on taking part in one of the live chat sessions, and then observing one. Also reading all the tweets that’s are posted on Twitter and see which tweets get aired on TV and which ones don’t. For my construct I will be using Gee’s method of framing. Gee introduced his definition of discourse by saying that it is the saying, writing, doing-being-valuing-believing combinations that are being in the world. Since my construct paper will be written about the behavior of people in a chat room I think that this would be a good way to begin framing by analyzing behavior in this chat room. I will also use Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” because talks about how people find it necessary to get involved with everything they stumble across on the internet or just take the main topic of each article. Carr says that it’s better to skim information just to see the existence before you let your mind get wrapped around with everything on the internet. I think that this would be interesting to apply this concept to this online community because it shows how people utilize their time by getting involved in arguments over nothing. This live chat is a great example of people who have let the internet take over their minds. According to Carr this type of live chat should be something that you just skim over, not get heavily involved in.
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By using Gees analyses I will be able to use his definition of Discourse to really analyze how people on the Oxygen Live Chat will behave. The Oxygen Live Chat will take place for the Bad Girls Club. What people do is that they chat with people from all over who are also watching the show and they debate about certain things that happen and make comments about the girls on the show. I think that by using Gee’s analyses to frame this community I can see how Discourse takes place in the way people chat online.My theoretical lens will involve peoples being and how they utilize things in this community. I can use Carr’s to frame this community and see how people get to heavily involved with things on the internet that they shouldn’t. Rather than knowing the existence of this chat room people have been to subjected to let this take over them. Debates about unnecessary things take over this chat room and it looses it purpose. This chat room is to make comments about certain situations. I think that the way that people comment on situations can be more analyzed and what seems to cause the biggest controversy.
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ReplyDeleteAfter thinking about how the online gaming community I am going to research differs from other online communities in terms of discourse, I have determined that I will use the framing lens presented in James Paul Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics.” Though numerous writings that we have read could be applied to this essay, I intend to stay strictly to Gee’s principles of Discourse, discourse, mush fake, and the sub classifications of discourse communities.Gee presents a contemplative fact at the beginning of his essay; he makes a point about how we use different discourses in different communities like his example of asking for a match in a neighborhood bar. This concept applies to most other communities whether we realize it or not. For instance, I would not talk to a complete gamer about the Super Bowl and I would not talk to a huge football fan strictly about video games. I intend to also make a point of the primary and secondary discourse theories presented in Gee’s essay. In these theories, Gee states that Primary discourse can be understood partially but secondary discourse has to be understood fluently. However, I feel as though this theory is incomplete. In my travels through different communities I have learned that there can be more levels of discourse in a community instead of just primary and secondary as you look at the community in more specific terms and relate to the people within the community. Gee uses Discourse to describe the “identity kit” of a group and how a specific group tries to set itself apart from other discourse communities. This can happen on different levels of society; just a few examples include a football team trying to set themselves apart from the rest of the competition with a groundbreaking play or a group of animal rights activists trying to make a stand for what they believe in through a protest. The way we act in almost all situations is influenced by which type of discourse community we are taking a part of. In a dominant discourse, people tend to watch what they say to keep their jobs secure and/or gain higher statuses in their community where as in a non dominant discourse, people can talk how they want to talk as long as they speak through the secondary discourse fluently. I have encountered this difference in a few situations before. Over the summer, I held a job at a Hyatt Hotel in the recreation department where I would have to watch what I would say because some of the things that ran through my head could end up getting me fired of hurt the integrity of the hotel. When I volunteered at a bible camp for community service I did not come across this problem. Because this held no importance for me other than the fact that it was for community service I felt comfortable voicing my ideas, granted it was through the secondary discourse of the other counselors. The last of Gee’s principles that I will be using as my framing lens is the ability to substitute a new word/ idea for one that is not available at the specific time also known as mush faking. The most common mush fake for myself would be rolling a paper ball up and shooting it like a basketball into a trash can, an activity I suppose most people have also taken part of.
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Though many different ideas went through my head as I was trying to find a discourse community to analyze, the one that stood out the community of League of Legends. This constantly evolving computer game has gained massive popularity over the last couple of years, finishing the Season 2 championships just a few weeks ago with 8,282,000 people watching as the brackets fell to the finals. The reason I picked this community was the fact that it is growing so large in such little time because of the fact that open forums allow people to blog about their ideas that can help improve certain characters of the game to make it more appealing to more gamers. Riot Games, the company that makes this game, has listened to it’s followers more than any other forum or blog site that I know personally or have been referenced to. They incorporate the majority opinion into their game, as to balance out certain aspects to make the game fair for all players which essentially is what a game must strive for if it would like to keep people playing. My identity in this community is already solidified. I am just another player, or a “summoner” as the players are called in this game. The great thing about being nothing more than a player in this community is the fact that 99% of the community are other players that I can relate to in a non dominate discourse instead of players searching for competitive tournaments to make a living off being a professional gamer, using a free and fun game as a dominant discourse. I play the game on the North American server so the primary discourse is usually English with the occasional Spanish speaker. The secondary discourse is a bit more complicated, however. The language of the game (i.e. new meta, smurf account, hue,...) is something that is not easily picked up right away. Most people who have not played that game are not expected to know what these words mean unless they have played a similar style game. Mush faking is a fairly obvious sign in this game as they just change out the items they buy in-game for similar items which can be bought for more or less gold depending on how the game is going. For my full paper, I intend to analyze these ideas more thoroughly and use Gee’s ideas to show how this community’s discourse differs from that of other gaming communities.
Part 1
ReplyDeleteThis semester has brought me into a world I never imagined. English has always been about grammar and understanding the context but not really thinking about the core. Brandt has been the most influential for this this semester. As I read Brandt’s paper I realized what I had done wrong these past sixteen years in mandatory learning. As Brandt described Johnny I began to understand teaching English to lower socio-economic students and people. For me the objective of a paper or anything written has never been hard to grasp and my ideas have never been blocked. Even though, in my non-doctoral opinion, Johnny was illiterate I saw that Brandt has the notion of educating him for the better. I had my doubts. Her ideas on sponsorship on literacy really spoke to me for this paper. Gee, Wardle and Suler all have their places in writing but Brandt helped me with my selection. The other three have influenced my writing but not to the point of Brandt. Gee gave be a better understanding of the author and discourse as well as the audience—but in hindsight I have been taught this since grammar school with Dick and Sally played with a ball bit; Wardle transcribed echelons onto the internet with authority in the online niche; Suler clarified what I had always suspected about online identities. As an outsider my sponsorship on the community I have chosen comes from pop-culture, internet memes and my day to day affiliation with these fringe cultures.
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Part 2 For my topic of choice if have chosen Pinterest.com. Pintrest is an eclectic collection of imaged based material. Pinterest wafted into my life on a whim as my friends always commented that they got these great crafting ideas from Pinterest. Lo and behold I am not a reformed Junkie. My identity of Pinterest is very mutli-cultural and a hodgepodge of ideas. I am not part of my community but rather a member of a group they are part of. The users on Pintrerst are my sponsorship as they direct me to websites that I would never have looked up or even thought of. I am thrilled Pintrest as allowed me to delve into my chosen community of Hipsters as a novice outsider but have the tools to navigate the website without any hindrances to my results. On Pinterest I have the ability to search keywords I associate with Hipsters. Mainly Hipsters, mainstream and BPR to name a few. Boards and People pop up that have these keywords. Through these boards and people I can click and research with relative ease the concept and ideas of Hipsters.
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After reading John Suler’s The Psychology of Cyberspace, I kept thinking to myself “this sounds familiar.” It took me a couple days, but then it hit me. This piece reminded me exactly of formspring. I know it’s a little outdated, but I thought it was the perfect example for the writing. The first thing in Suler’s piece is the “Disinhibition effect,” and that relates exactly to formspring. Formspring allows you to ask other people questions, or posts, and gives you the option to stay anonymous or be yourself. The majority of questions and posts still available are anonymous, so this was the perfect example. These posts ranged from the nicest or “benign” things as Suler would say, to the most painful or “toxic” posts. The main part of formspring is the “dissociative anonymity” that Suler brings up in his writing. I think this is the most crucial one. This is when people feel it is ok to write or posts certain things, as they are anonymous and there are absolutely no ties back to them. There is a sense of comfort when your name is not tied to something. Another part of Suler’s piece is “True self,” I think this is a pretty big part of formspring as well as some points seem to say things that are very revealing of who a person really is and who they pretend to be. My goal is to look farther into these posts, and talk to a couple of friends who I know are responsible for some posts, and see why they said what they did. I want to be able to see if there are hidden meanings to some of the posts, and why nobody takes credit for them on formspring.
people began to rip Ashley on formspring saying things such as “ Don’t b mad cause the guy u love got ur best friend and not u.” This person ofcourse was anonymous so we have no idea if it was a guy or girl. Since both Ashley and Chris are my best friends, I was there to witness the pain this caused both of them. Ashley was devasted and would cry herself to sleep all the time, but when she would go back to school, nobody treated her any different. It was just a normal day at school as if nothing was going on. Her friends were still her friends and talked to her about anything but the Chris situation. She can walk around school and no one looked at her wrong or anything like that. But as soon as school ended, back came the posts on formspring. Now I actually know who it was that put this post as I found out later. He so happens to be a friend of mine and Ashley. So I asked him why he said that and why he remained anonymous, and his only answer was “idk.” He said “ I felt like it was OK since everyone else was doing it and she wasn’t going to know it was me.” This ties into what Suler talks about in dissociative anonymity and disinhibition. He also remained her friend and acted like nothing happened at school. This person in particular uses toxic disinhibition to lash out at Ashley, and then seperates his personality online from the person he really is. He is actually very nice and usually helps people when they need it. – This is a piece out of my paper that I have written so far. I used this example because it has two of the big points in Suler’s writing. The disinhibition of this post this man wrote was toxic.
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He had some frustration built up from something in his own life that had gone wrong similar to the situation Ashley was is, but decided to take it out on Ashley. Other friends of this kid say they have never seen him lash out, or burst out in anger. He was a very steady minded kid who seemed to have his priorities straight. He was soft spoken and stayed relaxed for everything, so to know he said something hurtful was a surprise to me. The second part that goes with Suler’s piece is the dissociative inhibition property. This young man separated himself from the online persona he created, to remain Ashley’s friend, and get rid of the negative energy he had in his mind at the time. Since he was able to separate from it, he got rid of his own personal frustration about whatever it was that was bothering him. He said that was his first time in a very long time lashing out at someone like that. In the end, this kid was able to separate himself from his actions online, release his stress, and continue to keep his reputation as a calm, steady headed kid. Looking back he admits his regret for doing something like that, and he says he doesn’t have a separate persona online, that it was a one time thing and wont happen again.
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ReplyDeleteTo better investigate my community, I will use the article “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics Introduction”, by James Paul Gee. I’m specifically looking deeper into the term “Discourse” to investigate a non-dominant discourse and secondary discourse as an analytical framing lens which will bring solidarity to my particular online community.
Discourse, with a capital “D”, is the way of being accepted in the world based on specific directions on how to speak, write, and act in real life. A big part that I will be focusing on in my community is the way Gee focuses Discourses with writing, doing, being, valuing, and believing combinations rather than language or grammar. Through my analytical lens, I will focus in on the ways people take on certain roles in their online community and show what they value and believe in. In almost every online group, there are constant opportunities to show the community what is important to you; in ways you type, what you speak strongly of, what photos you may add, and what different online blogs or groups you’re even a part of. Gee states that while language is extremely important, grammar shouldn’t be the only aspect that is viewed when looking at a posting of a blog or online community. It should be the values and beliefs behind one’s postings for it to be powerful rather than focusing in on whether the language used is grammatically correct or not. I will be using the doing, being, valuing, and believing aspects of the Discourses Gee used to analyze my community.
The online community that I am investigating is called Dear Photograph. It is a blog page where people take a picture of a photo that has important meaning to them and place the original photo in the exact spot that it was taken however many years ago. They usually make the background match up perfectly with the background of the original photo; to show how much has changed since then. Most of the photos are of houses or trees from their childhood, now with their own children standing in their same spots. It reveals the importance of how much a picture can mean to one person or family; a picture can be worth a thousand words, so to say. In this blog, it’s not all about what the person has to say about the picture and whether it’s correct or not, it’s about the meaning behind the photo; the actual importance and story behind it and why it is so special to the person. I find it interesting that there are so many blogs of this, most are in memory of their loved ones who have passed. There is even a book that was written about this blog that shares people’s significant stories. It is quite touching seeing some of these pictures and reading the captions people post and some have literally melted my heart. It is of interest to me so I don’t mind looking further and deeper into this online community for a grade!
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Many of the readings that we have analyzed in class over the past few weeks have been very helpful, but the ones that I feel are more applicable and relatable to my discourse, are "Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces" by Elizabeth Wardle and "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics" by James Paul Gee. When reading both Gee and Wardle's articles, I could appreciate how much better I understood the term discourse and everything that was involved with discourse communities. In Wardle's, I found it easy to relate to the terms lexis, authority, and identity because those are very big parts of discourse communities. Wardle, in her article, talks about how people's writing styles change with their workplace and it is our job to find a way to learn how to do that. She tells us that we have to keep our identity no matter which environment we're in, and to implement it into our new writing styles. She also mentions that authority (like identity) is given to workers, but can be taken away just as easily. Gee's article helped break down the definition of discourse for me just a little bit more. In his article, he discusses the different levels of discourses, dominant and nondominant, and primary and secondary, and how they themselves are broken up. I personally liked his term "mushfake" because it basically gave a name to a word that I use very frequently. Metaknowledge is another word that he defined in his article and I find it to be very helpful, although it doesn't apply to the discourse community that I am going to be writing about.
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ReplyDeleteThe discourse community that I am investigating is called Pinterest. It's basically a website that acts as a huge pin board. You can find people to "follow" and people will "follow" you back, which just means that you are friends on Pinterest. The user "pins" pictures of things that are of their interest into categories on their pin board, and other followers are able to look at other people's pin boards and like or re-pin their pins. Once you have pinned something to your board, you can go back to those categories at any time and look at you pins, and most of the time the pins are linked to a website. Many people I know pin recipes or clothing (expecially wedding dresses), but I also know of a lot of people who pin crafty ideas, like do-it-yourself projects or wedding and holiday activities and decorations. Pinterest is a website that is highly supportive of the different identities of its users (Wardle) and that's one of the things that I like the most about it. I wouldn't say that there's an authority figure on Pinterest, because everyone takes care of their own profiles. There isn't a possibility for people to "mushfake" on Pinterest, as there is no experience needed to be a user of this website. It helps to get your mind working and, for me at least, it sparks a bit of creativity. I haven't completely finished my research for my discourse community, but I am definitely looking forward to continue looking into it.
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ReplyDeleteOne of the past readings that I feel really helps to create a lens to look at discourse communities is that of Gee. In his writing he talks about how you can not fully appreciate the discourse if you don’t understand the genre. It doesn’t matter how beautifully something is composed if you don’t understand the pretext and the content of the work then you can not fully understand its beauty. For example I know absolutely nothing about cars, so no matter how well a book on classic cars is written I can’t fully appreciate it without first understanding cars. Gee also states that discourse can be learned throughout ones lifetime and that you can acquire new ones as you go along, so just because I don’t understand cars now doesn’t mean that I never will. Gee also contributes our ability to understand discourse by our environment. You can use these attributes to examine a community by looking at their environment and what factors that plays into the discourse of the community. With my research I am using the environment lens. The type of discourse that I am looking at is learned and is no tone that someone would exactly learn from their parents or in school but rather by experiencing it and being apart of the community. I am trying to find if the geographic environment of members in the community changes the discourse or if it is the same no matter what there geographic environment is.
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I have decided to do research on a worldwide pop music website where users talk about music, celebrity news and talk about song lyrics and try to assess an debate its meaning. With Wardle’s idea of identity you can tell the identity users take by their user names you can tell how long they have been there and their level on interest. Some people will use a singers name and their birth year while others use there own name which I feel shows a lack of commitment to the community or as Shelby, a long time community user says these people are usually newbies that haven’t found there place in the grand scheme of things. Also with identity you can tell from the users profiles when they were last on and how many other users they associate with. Once again it shows the more involved users have the most connections and post the most on the site forums. An example of the communities resistance would be showing how they resist outside pressure, many people in the community are stereotyped a certain way and they resist the stereotypes in the group by identifying them and figuring out ways to prove they are wrong. Gee says that conflict arises when the discourse goes against ones dominant discourse, which would prove true in this community when new users who are not fully acclimated have problems with older users who know the inner workings of the community. Finally using Suler to examine the online community show that her principles of behavior on cyberspace are so true. From reading some of the things I could tell that a lot of these things would of probably have never been said in face to face conversations. There are also some conflicts that probably were due to miscommunications because of the screen. Screens cant laugh or show excitement people can only put lol or exclamation points after things to try and show what they mean but even then things can be misconstrued.
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ReplyDeleteI think that the main article I am going use in generating my analytical framing lens is “Identify, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces” by Elizabeth Wardle. This is because I think investigating how authority, or dominance, is shown in a forum would be an interesting topic. I will also include James Gee’s reading, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” because he describes a difference between Discourse and discourse, which will be another thing to investigate in the football forum.
These are the more important articles for what I am going to be looking into for my discourse community. With the help of Gee and Wardle I will be able to more thoroughly be able to establish how this online community works. I will be able to see who has more authority and who has little authority. I will also be analyzing if screen names come into affect with their position of power. Another part of Gee’s reading that I can utilize is the aspect of linguistics. In a football forum you will need a sense of the terminology that is involved in the game to become an effective member in the community. At first I thought that censorship could be an issue because it was through NFL.com but I looked into more forums and found a very good one located on ESPN.com that will work better and have a more open posting in it.
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The discourse community that I am investigating is an NFL forum on ESPN.com that football fans go on to talk about their team and share their ideas with other fans across the country. There is a general area where you can post about anything in the league and then there are 32 other individual forums, each representing one of the NFL teams. My focus will be on the Pittsburgh Steeler forum because I am a huge fan of the Steelers. My first discovery is that to be an active participant you must stay up to date with games. That was what the majority of the conversation is that is discussed. Earlier in the season, the Steelers were being criticized for their lack of defense and age. After the defining win over the Redskins, this past week, the users seem to be more optimistic about how the season will turn out. Another main point of discussion was the throwback uniforms that the Steelers wore against Washington for the first time since the 1930s. The way one can tell if a post is popular or not is by how many comments are under the topic. The amount of posts ranges any from 0-50. The ones with more posts tend to be ones that delve more of an educated opinion compared to someone just stating facts.
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ReplyDeleteI will investigate my online community using James Paul Gee’s principles. I will focus on the Discourse (with a capital D) and the “saying-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations”. The language used in my online community is an example of language learned not through “classroom” learning but social practices. I can also look at my community as a secondary, dominant discourse in order to learn what the people gain from this community. Furthermore, Suler’s article “The Psychology of Cyberspace” is another lens I will use to view my community. The distinct identities Suler presents all apply to my community. I will describe the actions of the members of the community using dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, and dissociative imagination, minimizing authority. In this way, I will see which identities are the most common and the reasons behind the members adapting to a particular identity.
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As a Hospitality Management major, I wanted to find an online community related to any of the areas under the Hospitality umbrella. After searching for some, I found a community called flyertalk a couple of days ago. In this community, anyone can create an account and post about the travel industry, including anything from air travel to the best prices to hotel and hospitality experiences.
Reading through my community, the definition of Discourse by Gee is appropriate because it shows that language is not something that is taught but rather a social practice. The people who post on this community use words that are only learned by being involved in travel. Examples of language use include “guest books”, “guest relations”, names of unfamiliar airlines, and names of organizations that play a part in the travel industry. Reading posts, I can see evidence of saying-doing-being-valuing-believing present in most posts. This community is also a secondary, dominant one because people gain information and opportunities to experience new places through the knowledge they gain from others posting. As I get more involved in flyer talk, I will learn more about how these people act and the particular Discourse.
In addition, people in my community tend to be very opinionated when it comes to rules regarding travel or the way in which a hotel is managed. If these people were having this type of discussion in person rather than online, their opinions may not be stated the same way and they may not be as straightforward. This is when Sutler’s identities come into play, as I will take different specific posts and analyze which factors influence a person adopting a certain role.
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ReplyDeleteAs I analyze the online community for my paper, I will be looking through the lens of Gee's paper "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics." Gee defines Discourses as "ways of being in the world; they are forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes." Many of these details about social network users aren't out in the open for me to analyze, so I will have to make up for this by reading deeply into their online postings in an effort to gain insight about them and the overall Discourse. I will be monitoring the grammar and phrasing used in communication. Because I'm dealing with a secondary Discourse (no one is born into an online community as their primary discourse), I will be seeing if the Discourse is dominant, participants have something to gain (such as money, prestige, status, etc.) or non-dominant, where participants are in it for social networking and fun. I will keep a conscious lookout for mush fake, where people try to B.S. their way into a Discourse. I will look for superficial features of the Discourse which purposefully trip up people who aren't fluent in the Discourse. In a Discourse, not all members are valued the same. Keeping this in mind, I will monitor which users say what and how their input is weighted in the conversation. Are certain members given authority based on the content of their post, the number of times they post, the grammar of their posts, or some other factor?
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Although I am a redditor already, the community I will be studying is the subreddit /gamedev. I haven't previously been to this subreddit and right of the bat, I notice it is very technical and professional in comparison to the elementary and common communication methods used in other subreddits that I visit. My main reason for studying this subreddit is because I am a Digital Media: Game Design major and would like to learn more about what I'm getting into and what to expect as I progress through my degree as well as what awaits me after college. At first glance, most threads begin to start with a question posed by someone new to the game development field or someone asking about a specific program or aspect of programming. Comments consist mostly of people already out of college and in the field who have experience already. Grammar and spelling isn't anything out of the ordinary in these conversations since most participants are educated and speaking from a professional standpoint (no slang, abbreviations, or cursing). No one is really gaining anything from this subreddit besides answers to their questions. Because no one is gaining status, prestige, money, or anything of the sort, I'm going to consider this a non-dominant Discourse. I will further analyze both new and old posts in the coming weeks to gain more knowledge about the subreddit and those who participate in it.
Brittan Petty
ReplyDeleteOM08
The readings that I will be using to help with my ethnology will be “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces,” by Elizabeth Wardle and “Literacy, Discourses, and Linguistics,” by James Paul Gee. I found these two readings very interesting and they also helped me to better understand the term Discourse. In Elizabeth Wardle’s piece, I felt that identity and authority has the most profound effect on me. Wardle describes that your identity in an online community must be adapted to fit the community in which you are apart of. This means that you can be yourself, but if by being yourself you do not fit in, then you must change your view. The authority part of Wardle’s piece states that you must adjust yourself to fit in with the community to be able to have authority. By doing this you are speaking in ways that are acceptable to other people who are apart of the community. The Article by Gee helped me define my discourse as a non-dominate community. This means that it is a secondary Discourse, “which often brings solidarity with a particular social network, but not a wider status and social goods in the society at large.
The online community that I have chosen to investigate is Pinterest. Within the Pinterest community, I plan on investigating the food (recipes) aspect of Pinterest. Pinterest is an online website and also app on a phone/ipod that allows you to view different pictures and pin them to your boards. The pictures are connected to web links that provide you with more information about that picture. For a picture on food, the picture is usually connected with a link that contains the recipe. With this online community, there really is no way to know if someone has authority or not. Many people may re-pin a picture from your board, but you are also doing the same thing. These pictures show up many times and is hard to know who has the most authority. I haven’t finished up all the research that I will be doing for this community, but I do have a lot of experience that I believe will help tremendously with this project.
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ReplyDeletefrom Greene: argument as conversation
from Grant-Davie: audience
To investigate my community, Greenpeace blogs, I will use the knowledge from Greene's piece that "every argument you make is connected to other arguments." I will use his "entering the conversation" questions to analyze specific blog posts. For example, I could question the relevance, evidence used to persuade readers, and the likelihood of change. I will use this frame in combination with the viewpoint of an audience member. Greene provides good strategies for readers to read with a certain perspective. I will view this community through the eyes of an environmental activist. Through this lens I can see how each blog post is crafted to appeal to a very specific audience.
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On the Greenpeace blogs home page there are the most recent blog posts. Every day there are several posts from many different authors. What stuck out to me is how many of the posts do not provide the reader with a lot of context. This means that a very specific and informed audience of environmental activists will be reading these posts. The authors know that the people who care enough to come to this site and inform themselves will already be a part of this "conversation." The reporting of news on this website contrasts greatly with the reporting on other sites because of the audience.
From my environmental activist viewpoint, I saw the language used and arguments made in a positive light. This again shows the importance of audience awareness. The authors of many blog posts use humor or esoteric terms to relate to environmentalists. They also make use of logos and pathos to draw their readers in. Since environmentalists tend to be passionate and scientifically knowledgeable people, these are effective strategies.
Greenpeace blogs makes use of popular "tags" to direct its viewers to the issues they find most important. Some examples are "arctic drilling", "coal", and "deforestation." By grouping the most recent blog posts into these categories they are creating an "argument as a conversation." Readers can see more context this way and view the diverse evidence presented by different authors. Seeing many blogs posts organized around the same issue could have a greater affect on the audience. A reader could be more likely to take action after seeing many different perspectives. Therefore, the "tags" are a great way for Greenpeace to motivate activists.
0M08
DeleteI think using the lens of an audience is an interesting way to look at a community. As you pointed out in the second part of your post that audience awareness is important because the audience needs to be able to understand what you are saying and is going to need to know certain terms associated with the community that you are being specific towards.
0M08
ReplyDeleteI have chosen to utilize the principles of James Paul Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” to study my ethnography group for this assignment. One of the main arguments that Gee presents is the definition of Discourse (spelled with a capital “D”), which include an individual engaging in language through the “doing-being-valuing-believing combination”; by that, he means that language goes beyond the physical act of writing and grammar to include the internal attitudes and views of the writer. In most cases, writers in these online communities are presenting and sharing their own personal views and attempting to get the readers to either agree or at least view a situation through their perspective. This obviously goes beyond how we compose in the online blogs and communities (as I noticed grammatical correctness is widely ignored in the community I chose) and the readers who visit these communities care more about what the posters are saying or focus more on their personal view. Elizabeth Wardle’s piece, “Identity, Authority and Learning to Write in New Workplaces,” also touches on a similar issue, so I have chosen to also fame my research on my online community with a few of her arguments as well. Wardle also addresses the fact that writing is important on a much deeper level and that its effectiveness relies on how we can relate to a new community through identity and authority. What I found interesting was her argument on the way writers can relate or feel a sense of belonging through engagement, imagination and enterprise. Through these three modes, an individual can successfully establish an identity (and therefore, potentially gain authority) by trying to find interpersonal relationships (engagement), finding their potential place in another community’s establishment (imagination) and “aligning” our selves within a framework.
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For my own ethnography group, I have chosen to assess the type of community that Wardle and Gee argued for in their essays, which is a community with language that expands beyond the written word. I chose to research an online art community, called bluecanvas.com. The site includes a number of ways to communicate, including blogs, groups and forums. The predominant usage of communication, however, is through the physical images the artists/members of the community paint, draw, sculpt, or photograph. One of Gee’s principles was Discourse, this presentation of personal beliefs. Because his argument went beyond grammatical structure, I thought that his argument was sufficient because the content of my community’s communication are visual images. Within these works of art that these artists present are in fact underlying themes representative of their own personal beliefs and emotions. I also saw that there were subgroups within bluecanvas’ blogs, such as a group for photography, a group for self-taught artists, and various groups for painting. Though the entire website is devoted to all media of art, there are still those members who find more relation to a certain aspect of art. In her article, Wardle talks about trying to fit within a certain community by learning the customs of these groups and transcending ourselves to establish an identity within them. When reading the comments on many of the blogs, such as in photography for instance, I notice much of the dialogue focused on lighting, framing and “composition”. This established separate, individual identities that the different artists framed in their subcommunities. Wardle also talked about a new member “imagining their own work…as being an important part of a larger enterprise”. Many users were in fact doing this by posting their own work among thousands of other pieces of art and promoting others to buy their work.
Catherine Rucker
ReplyDelete0M08
Part 1
I’ve chosen to talk about the role of identity in online communities. Wardle wrote about how some people have trouble enculturating into new or unfamiliar communities, so I’ve decided to join a site as a new member so that I may view various aspects of the site with a novice’s eye. Throughout my exploration of the site and of the goings-on that happen on a daily basis, I’ll have to create an identity for myself as well as observe the actions and behaviors of those who have been in the community the longest. I want to find out how long it takes, for what Wardle calls a ‘neophyte’, to conform to the personalities mostly seen throughout the site and chat rooms based on the authority each individual possesses. I also want to see if the forming of identity is a smooth process, or something of a rebellion like Wardle mentions. I’ve seen that there are new members joining every day, so although I will be considered a ‘neophyte’ of sorts, I’ll have plenty of other individuals I can observe through wall postings and chat room sessions. I might even go into exploring how profile pictures and how usernames effect or hinder one’s forming of identity, as well as how writing, and the language used affects the way people are viewed in regards to authority.
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Part 2
I’ve noticed that the site is very guarded in its acceptance with new members. You may sign up to become part of the community, but it goes through a verification process with, I believe, the individuals who created the website. It’s not at all like Twitter or Facebook where you can sign up and automatically join in conversations and post pictures and videos. You actually have to wait a day or so to receive an email back from them saying that you’ve been accepted. So after being approved, you receive a friend request from the CEO and others who are interested in welcoming newcomers. It kind of makes you feel important, or gives you the identity of someone who could potentially be an important person in promoting their site to others. So afterwards, they give you a warm welcome and provide you with information about the site, including what is and isn’t allowed when posting on your wall or someone else’s. They also have a FAQ page, for newer members to become familiar with chat room procedures. Obviously the identity of CEO is very important, and I believe it helps them keep track of us as well to make sure that no one is doing anything inappropriate on their site. Truthfully, it kind of made me feel like I was being watched, but it definitely put me in my place, and gave me insight into who’s in charge and who has enough authority to revoke my membership.
I thought your community you chose seemed really interesting. From your description of the site, I think it's the perfect setting to analyze identity, especially the environment you put yourself in with the CEO of this site. One of the issues Wardle talked about was the case of the computer programmer who didn't know his place. I wonder if you might even observe a similar case in your online community. I would imagine the feeling of being watched that you stated in your post would definitely cause some identity issues, especially because most online users are in fact used to working in the environments of social media sites.
Delete0037
ReplyDeleteFor my analytical framing lens, I am using Elizabeth Wardle’s “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces” to use the ideas of:
1) Identity
2) Authority
I am also using James Paul Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” to use the ideas of:
1) Non-dominant Discourses.
2) Mushfake
The analytical lens I am using is to look at my discourse community, Guitar Forums, by focusing on the identities of the members of this community and how they each reached their own sense of identity and how their writing allows others to see what their identity in the community is, and the motives they each had for becoming the identities that they did; I will look at authority by seeing how the forum itself may or may not endorse certain members as authority positions or if that authority is gained in another way; for non-dominant discourses I am looking at what is the motivation for people to become authority figures or join the forum in general when it is only a social network, and by being a non-dominant discourse leads to know material goods or rewards for involvement; and last, I am going to try to understand how the prison term mushfake applies to a music forum, where people involved in a conversation may not exactly have full knowledge of what they are talking about but continue the conversation anyways just to not appear the “loser”.
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ReplyDeleteMy analysis of my community up to this point on terms of identity is that generally everyone is similar. Obviously we are all different people from various backgrounds, but having a common passion uniting us all binds us together in a way that we all are relatable to a degree. In terms of the psychology of cyberspace, I notice the application of this concept the most when discussions or comments on original videos are present. When asked to present their criticisms I find that people are much more brutally honest or mean than they would be in person. In person most people would never criticize strangers, yet online it is almost expected.
Brandon Jones 0037 Concepts of Dominant vs. Non-dominant Discourses/The Psychology of Cyberspace
ReplyDeleteIn my response I am going to implement elements of Gee’s definitions of non-dominant Discourses and dominant Discourses from his work, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics.” Gee defines a non-dominant Discourse as secondary discourses that don’t bring money, power, or prestige. Dominant Discourses do bring these characteristics and they’re also secondary discourses, which are non-home-based institutions. Bleacher Report is an online community that brings news together with fans’ opinions so that many topics can be discussed by integrating sports and social media. Users of this community can range from professional and published writers to the average joe, fans who have watched the game for years and think they know everything about it. I will focus on one section of this website, NBA Basketball. In my community, there are prevalent Dominant discourses. One can gain prestige based on their total number of article reads, comments, and on what other mediums or events on which they have been published (ESPN, CBS, London Olympics, etc.) Anyone can join this community but in order to gain credibility within this community one must gain accolades similar to the ones aforementioned. Users are unpaid contributors, so they find solace in earning marks that are displaced on their profile page which have icons that distinguish what events they have covered and what other networks they have written for. For example, a torch may be used if the writer covered the 2012 London Olympics and a basketball may be used if a writer has written columns for ESPN.com’s Heat Index. There is also a side bar on their profile page which lists specific achievements they have garnered on articles they have written in the past. They are visualized as gold, silver, and bronze medals and when hovered over they display what achievement the writer has accomplished. For example, one medal could say “article has received 50,000 reads” or “article received 500 comments.” Writers in this community also have to mushfake, make do with their available resources to get by. They are not going to have the tools and resources available to professional writers and companies like advanced statistics, in-depth interviews, and so on. As a result of this, many articles in this community are based solely on opinion and preference of certain teams and players, therefore making them extremely biased. This community also exhibits a model of positive reinforcement by way of tokens, a nod to a practice that is used in psychology. I will discuss this in the next section of the response.
Brandon Jones 0037 Part 2
ReplyDelete------------------------------------------------------------------
To analyze the framework of my particular community I will uses concepts expressed in John Suler ‘s The Psychology of Cyberspace. Suler discusses the concepts of dissociative anonymity and invisibility which are predominant within Bleacher Report. Many of the contributors in this community are not known personally by the people who read their articles, let alone ever seen by these people except for a 2 inch by 2 inch profile picture. Of course these writers and columnists do use their real names, but they display effects of this dissociative anonymity because we as readers do not know the true nature of who they are and what their beliefs are aside from what they tell us in their articles and columns. Essentially, we all, all us members of Bleacher Report, can recreate ourselves in this online space and we too can make ourselves published and world-renowned authors. Commenters on these articles display traits from Suler’s concept of “It’s just a game”, dissociative imagination, in that they find the need to post humorous comments which are baseless or profanity laced which serves to provokes responses out of other members. I’ve found that members have gone as far as trying to convey a “tough guy” facade which often results in arguments that would never take place in the real world. Members will find themselves saying things they would never say to someone face-to-face and they will end up saying many vulgar or offensive ideals or beliefs they would not want anyone to associate with them in the real world. This community also displays the notion of minimizing authority that everyone in the community is built as equals. No matter how many accolades you have built up you are still prone to the harshest of criticisms. I find that even the most published and credible authors are met constantly with comments on their articles stating things like, “Easily the worst writer in BR (Bleacher Report)” and “Do you even know how to play basketball.” So far within my research, these are claims about my community that I can make.
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ReplyDeletePart 1:
Of the authors we have looked at, James Paul Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” discusses the concept of Discourses and theses analytical principles are the optimal investigative lens to implement into my research. The definition of Discourses, the “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” that are “the ways of being in the world”, applies perfectly to online communities. Secondary Discourses characterize online communities and the dominant and non-dominant Discourses within this sub-group help illuminate the Discourse even further. I will also use Gee’s concepts of apprenticeship and mushfake as components of my analytical lens to further examine my chosen digital discourse community.
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Part 2:
I struggled to find a digital discourse community that I could relate to as I am not a big social network connoisseur. After some research I stumbled upon a website by the name of Last.fm which, to my gratification, is all about music and those who enjoy it. I am a music fanatic, so when I came across this community that almost exclusively converses about music based on common interests with other users called “musical neighbors”, I was hooked. In a nut shell, this website is used to listen to music and with each “scrobble”, or each time a song is listened to, data is collected and your music preferences are learned. This can spur more likable tracks that show up in your music player or even discoveries of a new favorite artist. Users can communicate in the community section. This is where the discourse (connected stretches of language) happens. The three main sections are broken into support, community and development. These three groups are then divided into sub-groups but I will focus on the community group. This is made up of three forums in itself: “GD game threads”, which can be utilized to play forum games with other users, the “In the News” forum, where users can discuss trending articles, and finally the “General Discussion” forum for everything else. There are countless threads here on which to choose from and one can just dive right in and start communicating. I will use my analytical lens of Discourses and secondary Discourses to delve further into this online community.
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ReplyDeleteFor my analytical lens, I am using Wardle's “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces” In this, Wardle explains how identity changes overtime through many different ways depending on the online community you are a part of. Each online community has it's own way that people portray themselves and the types of people that use the different communities. For example, your identity on a music blog would be much different than on a blog about food. Every community changes the way people portray themselves in order to fit in. Also, each website has a different way to show who has more authority than others. On Facebook, it's by who has the most friends or who can get the most likes. While on twitter, it's by how many followers you have. Each online community is different than other online communities in so many ways that it's almost impossible to name every way.
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The online community I am choosing to investigate is twitter. The reason why I'm so fascinated by twitter is the fact that anyone can use it. Twitter forces you to change your identity because unlike normal conversations with friends and family, the goal of twitter is to get the most followers you can. The amount of followers you have also shows the amount of authority you have. Wardle's piece ties into twitter through identity and authority. And almost everyone can relate to what they see on twitter. With twitter, you choose what you see on your home page of twitter. People can also choose to follow what you tweet about. I plan to investigate how people treat twitter differently than normal conversations and what makes the way they talk on twitter different than in real life.
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ReplyDeletePart 1
What I will use to create my lens:
Gee, (481-497)
Language.
When looking how the community communicates and connects Gee explains how a person can know the grammar of a language but not know how to use the language.
Wardle, (520-537)
Authority & Identity.
Wardle explains that authority is granted to people through institutions and must be maintained by those individuals’ words and actions. Identity is in a way, gained through the institutions and helps shape your identity in the community’s eyes.
Suler, WWW “The Psychology of Cyberspace”
Anonymity & Invisibility.
Suler explains invisibility as what allows people to browse through places and nobody knowing they did. Anonymity is when your true identity is hidden from the online community.
These three components will make up the analytical framing lens that I will use, helping me to understand the community. Language and how the members of the community speak will be the first step to understand what is actually being transcribed, some ways of communication in the community separate it from outsiders and it is vital to recognize them. The second component is authority and identity, what makes a member credible and trusted. By examining what kind of authority different members have I can also get a better sense of what identity the user is portraying and their role in the communities basic functioning. The third component, anonymity and invisibility will help me get a feel for what the community shows and level of involvement, what is shared and where member’s activity is public to the community.
Part 2
I decided to look at a tattoo forum, I’ve always enjoyed creative drawing and just fool around with making designs so I thought it would be interesting.
Through my initial browsing I was looking through a Language perspective of Gee, I found many terms such as, “irons” “works” that describe different parts of a tattoo gun. And other terms like “carving” “airbrushing” and “tight”. Most of the information being shared are just pictures of work and peoples opinions of the pieces. The language overall is casual civilized talk but those who are deeply involved in the community and tattooing will use slang that is hard to understand without some sort of context.
Anonymity and Invisibility are very apparent in the community, users can post profile pictures of themselves, you can see their join date, amount of messages, username, gender, and last login time which they say “(username) was last seen (date and time)”.
Authority and Identity is very present in postings, members who own their own shop and consider themselves master tattoo artists are treated with more respect and their ideas highly influence others, those who are new in the community flock to the discussion where authority figures are showcasing their work to get ideas. Some members clearly have a different identity, for example the administrators are portrayed totally different to show their authority and therefore shaping their identity in other members eyes.
I am not finished researching the forum as there is tons of stuff to read through, the structure of communication is very deep, I may consider looking at other tattoo forums to get a feel for how this one compares.
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ReplyDeleteThe article I used to frame my analytical lens was Grant-Davie’s “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents”. The principles that I use as my lens are the main components of a rhetorical situation as well as associating components. These include the rhetors, the audience, constraints, and the exigence; as well as discourse. I see discourse as the principle that links everything together. Without discourse you can’t have a rhetorical situation; however, it isn’t a unique quality of a rhetorical situation. One could say a rhetorical situation is framed by its four constituents. The audience plays a major role in this since it influences the topic, reasoning behind the argument, and the type of discourse carried out by the rhetor. I see the rhetorical situation framed by the rhetor, which is directly framed by the audience, exigence, and constraints.
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The community I am using for my digital discourse community project is a friendly online gaming community known as “Virtual Motorsports”. Wardle talked about the identity of a community in her article “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces”. She discusses three modes of how new newcomers find their belonging within the community. I find the “Engagement” mode the most suitable for “Virtual Motorsports” because there are a wide variety of skill levels in the community that work together to improve each other and develop friendships in the process. In the community there are people that represent identity resistance. These people often stay away from the social aspect of the community, which could be chatting in the forums or taking place in unofficial practice sessions with other members of the community. They log on and run the race and log off afterwards avoiding social interactions with others regarding their particular race.
• How sponsors influence literacy (The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me, Alexie)
ReplyDelete• The interpretation of different rhetorical situations within varying cultures (Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents, Grant-Davie)
• The variety of discourses when dealing with different cultural trends (Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction, Gee)
• The difference between the projected identity on the internet and the face to face identity (The Psychology of Cyberspace, Suler)
Because I am focusing on the difference in writing in different cultures I want to focus on the influence of the different sponsors and the resulting products of writers in the NaNoWriMo forums. I plan on focusing on the different types of interaction that takes place in the forums between more stable regions like those within the United States, Great Britain, and Canada versus less stable regions such as Sudan, Afghanistan, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. I will also use The Psychology of Cyberspace from Suler because I will be able to interact face to face with people from the forum.
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From what I’ve seen in my particular discourse community, there is a definite difference in content when examining different regions. There is a difference in the frequency of posts and the content of the posts themselves. In regions in the United States, for example, a lot of the posts in the forum refer to Write-Ins, which are gatherings where the members of the same region gather together face to face to write together and work on their projects. You get a chance to socialize with the people you’ve been interacting with on the internet. However, when looking at regions in countries like Iraq the posts mention nothing of Write-Ins at all and there are considerably less members to those regions.
Travis Badall - 0037
ReplyDeleteI decided that for my digital discourse community, I'm going to use an analytical lens that takes points from Suler's work, "The Psychology of Cyberspace". I want to see if people take on different identities, and how that affects their standing in the community. I want to see how people gain authority in the community, I'm researching as well as how difficult/easy it is to do so. In addition, I'd like to investigate if people reveal personal information about themselves or if their online persona is completely disinhibited from their true self.
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I'm going to investigate an online community called FMyLife. It's basically a website where people post how bad they're day is going for the sheer benefit of making other people laugh, having others sympathize with them or making people feel better about themselves because they could be going through worse. I want to take a look at the commenters and she what kind of identity they take on. I've noticed when browsing through that many people are Grammar Nazis. Grammar Nazis are people who correct other people's grammar and spelling, usually in an attempt to belittle the other person by showing how dumb they are. They also tend to think they have a higher standard in the community but I, as well as many other, find them equally annoying, if not more so, than the person making the silly grammatical/spelling mistake. I've also noticed people are very aggressive when it comes to commenting. When someone makes a "dumb" comment, others start bashing that person, and may even look to their profile picture or start reading their profile just to find things to bash in there. There's definitely a sense of disinhibition when people do that because I highly doubt they would go around doing the same in a face-to-face scenario.
One more thing I've noticed about this community is that there are people who are recognized as having authority or a higher standing than the rest of the community. When people (I'm assuming newcomers) try to make fun of them or belittle their comment, other FMLers will come to side with the more respected person and say "You don't talk to (insert username) like that, blah blah blah". My quest is to find out how these people came to a higher standing and also if it affects their offline social life.
Michael Marinari 0119
ReplyDeletePart 1:
I was thinking of doing my digital discourse community on a calorie counting website that I am a member on that serves a dual function of keeping track of calories that I consume and burn off and an open forum for every member to share their experiences and ideas with each other efficiently. The analytical lens I’m using to examine my community with is Wardle’s piece “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces”. Her piece describes the three aspects of “engagement, imagination, and alignment” that are crucial to belonging in a community. Within my community there has to be engagement to show any type of progression. Without engaging within the community (by posting what you eat and blogging it) and outside the community (watching what you eat and working out) you cannot hope to feel a part of my community. You must also be in “alignment” as Wardle says, with most of the community to fit in. You must “find common ground” with how you post. Everyone when they post are usually very proud of how they progress and if you were to notice that they ate shit that day or something of that sort you cannot shit all over their day just because they cheated on their diet one day. Finally you must be imaginative. Everyone on my community communicates new workout ideas and diet tips they have discovered with one another to help each other out.
I really like the digital discourse community that you choose to do your ethnology on! A lot of people use that app/website, as do i. I agree with you when you said below that you do not have to be very authoritative in the community. People would rather see you being more helpful and motivated. Communicating within the community is very easy also. You are able to ask questions pertaining to weight loss, workouts, and other stuff. I also believe that you do have to adapt to their language on a certain level (i.e. know different workout terms, diet terms, ect.). The common ground was a great concept to bring up! I think that everyone in this community has some type of common ground whether it be working out, eating healthy, losing weight, gaining weight, ect. So that was a excellent point. All in all, i really like your community and i can really relate to it.
DeleteMichael Marinari
ReplyDelete0119-Part 2
I sort of already answered this part in the opening but Wardle's speal on identity fits my community. You have to not be authoritative within my community but very helpful and charismatic. The users in my community only continue to sign on and read what you have to say if they see you scored very high in your day's work and talk very passionately about how you did it. It's very easy to communicate within the community as long as you are polite and have other information to share. You must also have a specific lexis while talking about what you do and how you do it. It is a very easy language to pick up but specific to working out and dieting.
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ReplyDeleteFor my Digital Discourse Community Ethnography I will be exploring and investigating my personal Facebook news feed. After looking through it for the past month, I have noticed a few patterns. I decided to further investigate one reoccurring posting. The “Truth is…” status is one posted by many and also comes in other sister forms, such as “TBH” (to be honest), rate 1-10 lms (like my status), and “lms and I will send you a secret in your inbox.” These statuses make me wonder why a person would post this.
I am using a few lenses to investigate this community because I believe it is so complex and to analyze it as best as possible I need to look at different angles and asking many questions. Therefore, I will apply the principles of authority and identity as seen in Wardle’s article. As well as explore the use of Suler’s benign disinhibition when posting on other’s walls, and of course the Discourse of the community that Gee talks about in his article.
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Reading my community through Wardle’s “authority” lens makes me think about how posting a “Truth is” status can help a person gain authority in their Facebook community. First, I must analyze what having authority in Facebook means. There are many different meanings to the word “authority,” but in this case, a person of authority in Facebook is someone who possesses influence over their followers/friends, starts trends, has tons of likes on every post, and has many friends. Now how can posting the two little words “Truth is…” on your wall help you gain authority? Well, usually it won’t make you popular over night, but how I see it is if you post a “Truth is…” status and receive a lot of likes, then there you go! You have already acquired one quality of a person of authority. Then when you post a “Truth is...” response to those who liked your status, their friends will see it. Usually a person posts something really nice on their wall and if others see it, they will think you are nice and want to be friends with you. Awesome! Now you have gained two traits of a person of authority: lots of likes and tons of friends! To continue to gain authority you must maintain the increase of likes and friends because the more friends you have means more likes on your status, which means the more you will appear on a person’s news feed and the better chance of obtaining more likes!
Although I am exploring many lenses from all the articles in this unit, I am still working on this project and haven’t really gotten a chance to explore every possible lens to analyze my community. I know I have only shown a small portion of my exploration of my community, but I am in the process and want to take my time to collect more evidence.
Jayda Burkhardt
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ReplyDeleteThe community that I chose to analyze is an online blog based on travelers and their experiences of different areas of the world. The lens that I plan on using for my online community is Elizabeth Wardle’s interpretation of Identity and Authority. I also found that Barbara Tomlinson’s ideas on culturally shared knowledge may come in to action during my analysis of this community. Another source that I plan on referring to is Suler’s claims about people’s behavior online.
Wardle explains Identity as a constantly changing demeanor and people are always adapting new roles to keep up with the rest of the community. I think that this is a perfect analytical lens for my online community because the whole idea of this blog is to keep fellow followers updated on different events and global issues going on. This helps the bloggers to become aware of what to expect when they travels to these areas. The people involved in this website need to alter their discourse to keep their postings relevant and appropriate because they are dealing with people from all over the world. There are so many different cultures involved in this community and it is very important that they do not offend people from other places. I also think that Barbara Tomlinson’s topic of culturally shared knowledge is applicable to my chosen discourse community. As I stated before the bloggers come from a variety of different backgrounds which makes it easy for them to group up with each other. People are more likely to trust information that comes from a person with a similar culture to them. Suler’s ideas are very apparent in my chosen community because this is an online blog. These bloggers are dishing out information from all over the world and majority of them will never meet each other. Yet here they are trusting advice to travel around the world given to them from an unknown source.
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The online community that I chose is very interesting because it is an open invitation to anybody who happens upon the site. It is a rich source of information for anybody interested in traveling and visiting foreign places. The data that I have collected so far includes different postings from bloggers referring to The UK and Ireland, The United States and Responsible Travelers. These are the three topics that I found on the site that were the most appealing to me so I decided to base my information on them. From scrolling through this blog sites I have noticed that this is a very casual and low key website. It is not business related but I have read some people that use it as a way to research the area they plan on visiting. These people seem to be eager to share their wealth of knowledge with other bloggers. I feel that it connects mostly to Wardle’s view on changing roles of Identity for different topics. I also think that Suler’s benign disinhibition is noticeable because people are handing out free advice on this website. This community is not being rewarded for suggesting different things and they are doing it without an incentive.
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ReplyDeletePart One:
The recent readings presented in this course has provided me with various framing lens and insight on how to analyze a discourse community. Elizabeth Wardle’s "Identify, Authority, and Learning to write in New Workplaces" introduces the concepts of identity and authority within a community and how they contribute to the participation within that community. Confirming an identity in a discourse community is to actively engage in discursive practices. In addition to these constituents within a community, James Paul Gee’s "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics" further extends the frame of analysis by shifting focus from the persona of members in a discourse community to the defined grammar. Gee introduces some peculiar terminology such as “mush-fake”—a participant who feigns an identity within the discourse community. Another important aspect of discourse communities is the applicable lexis established by the nature of the community. Delving deeper into the analysis and depending on the community, you may discover the presence of genres within that community; each with possibly differing lexis and associated grammar. The community I chose to analyze is one I am very closely and actively associated with. Using these tools and my own expertise allows for a very thorough analysis of my discourse community.
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ReplyDeletePart 1
I will be using Gee’s writing on “Discourses” and Wardle’s “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces” as lenses to help analyze my discourse community. Gee states in his discourse that a Discourse comes with an “identity kit” that tells members of the community how they should behave and what role they should assume. If someone is not behaving in a way they should in a Discourse, than that person will never become a full-fledged member with authority. This means that if a person’s identity is one that can fit the criteria of a “good” member. This goes hand in hand with Wardle’s writing. Wardle states that once one has authority in a community, what they say or write will not be questioned or argued as much as a member without authority. Once people establish their identity in a community, their authority level will be related to the identity. If the identity they assume changes, so will the level of authority they command. As members build a positive reputation, authority is built as well. This can be seen in my online discourse community; members with a lot of posts and views will most likely have their posts be accepted as helpful with more + ratings because they are considered an authority figure. I will be using these lenses to investigate how members behave while online, what language choices they use, and what identity they assume while posting.
Part 2
The discourse community I have chosen is League of Legends, a computer game where users are “summoners” controlling a “champion.” I play this game for fun from time to time and don’t take it too seriously. I am choosing this as my discourse community because I find it very interesting how people play the game on differing levels of seriousness. Also, the game is greatly influenced by its users. The developers of the game take suggestions from users and try to make the game as fair as possible for everyone to play. This encourages people to post on forums how they think the game should be changed to make the game more fair. Since I do not take this game very seriously, when I go into the forums for the game, I often do not understand everything being posted. This provides an interesting opportunity to study how people communicate and how language choice attributes to their identity and authority. Using Wardle’s ideas on identity and authority, I’ve determined users who post on threads explaining advanced strategy and build guides assume the identity of authority figures. Then there are the people who ask questions about strategy and view the threads to learn how to play who establish their identity as novice or beginner players. For my final paper, I will be analyzing how different players on different levels of competiveness communicate and what identities they assume while communicating.
0119
ReplyDeleteThe framing lens I will use to investigate my community is Suler’s Psychology of Cyberspace. When I read this piece I was interested in the disinhibition effect, dissociative anonymity, and invisibility. The disinhibition effect can either be benign or toxic meaning that it brings out the positive or negative side of people. People in an online community might act more generous than they would in real life by complementing or helping another person on the web. They might also act in a rude and malicious manner, making threats and making people feel like crap. Dissociative anonymity is being able to keep your identity hidden because people will only really know only what you tell them about yourself. This anonymity relates to the disinhibition effect since people feel like they can be more open. What they say cannot be connected to their identity outside of the internet and they do not have to take responsibility for what they share. “Invisibility gives people the courage to go places and do things that they otherwise wouldn't.” Invisibility is similar to anonymity but different because invisibility is more physical. People might know a lot about who you are when you are on facebook but they cannot physically see you, meaning body language and expressions are not seen. This is a very important part of the disinhibition effect because it allows for a bigger range of discussion due to not being able to see an immediate sign of disapproval that would alter a discussion significantly if it were to be face-to-face.
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The online community I am currently looking into is the subreddit, /r/AskReddit. This community I came across recently made me think of Suler’s article almost instantly. In this subreddit, reddit members ask questions and other members answer them and comment on them. These questions can be about absolutely anything as long as it meets certain rules. Some of these rules are: that the questions must be thought-provoking, there cannot be any personal information posted, and the questions’ purpose cannot be to gain publicity. One of the posts that made me think of Suler was titled, “Throwaway time! What's your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out?” Wow what a crazy question, would people really write about something like this. That’s what I first thought, but then I clicked on it and people actually poured out their deepest, personal secrets and my mind was blown away. This is the disinhibition effect in full effect. They say and share all these things about themselves because it will not be directly linked to the rest of their lives. This is a place where benign disinhibition and anonymity are practiced to ask questions and create discussions that people can relate to and share their experiences openly. Invisibility is also practiced I noticed some things that people commented on they would not actually say to that person face to face because they would not have the courage.
As I have thought and analyzed my online community which is a community that is geared towards dating tips and cute date ideas, I realized I am a helpless romantic haha just kidding. But I have realize I don’t talk about this too much with people unless I know they share my common love interest for relationships and love for others. This brings me to realize that my framing lens will be used from Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics.” I notice that I don’t really talk much about my ideas about dates or relationships unless I am around non judgmental friends who won’t judge me for always thinking about my love life or how to better myself in my relationship/friendships. This is a prime example of what Gee talks about. I wouldn’t talk about these topics of cuteness and caring to my guys friends who just want to enjoy college and go through the next four years going to pound town with whatever attractive girl they meet when we go out nor would I talk about it to my slutty girlfriends who are hopeless, nor would I talk about it to others who just don’t like getting close to others. We naturally use different discourses in different communities so we can relate to whomever we are talking to. I want to analyze what it really means to be in a discourse community such as this one. As stated in Gee, you don’t grasp a full admiration for a subject if you can’t understand it. People who wouldn’t understand this subject are ones who have never cared for an individual who have also cared for them back in my opinion. But as also learned in Gee, that can change over ones’ life and maybe they can become understanding of this subject matter even though they don’t have an understanding for it now. I feel like this community can be very deep and go beyond primary and secondary discourses and I would like to investigate so by reading and responding to other blog posts and possibly skyping people with authority within my community and listening to their feelings on love and relationships and analyzing what they have to say. I would like to see how deep my analyzing gets and am excited for what I discover.
ReplyDelete0119
Delete0119
ReplyDeletePart Two:
I chose to analyze the prevalent discourse community that governs the fields of computer science, programming, and engineering. You can generalize this discourse community and encompass all the lexis within each genre or you can differentiate into the many present genres of the community. I must say that this discourse community has high exclusivity and encompasses a plethora of technical jargon that makes this community considerably esoteric. I do posses an identity in this community and as per the readings in this course, I can make several authoritative claims about this community. I claim that there exists an internal an external authority, each with a differing level of credibility in this community. The nature of the community and my identity with this discourse community grants me an inherent external authority. Internal authority and credibility is attained with a great deal of effort and display of technical knowledge subject to scrutiny by the members of the community. In order to narrow the discourse community from the highly broad introduction I presented, I will dissect the programming community found at the common engineering workplace and the student programming community here at the University.
0119
ReplyDeleteIn my community the data I have gathered are just basically blogs and posting of cute date ideas and communication tips within a relationship or when talking to someone you like. I have found that there isn’t too much authority within it and I feel that is because love is a gentle subject so everyone within the community respects one another and doesn’t want to take charge and be the relationship police or feeling dictator but rather everyone listens, comments, or gives advice. Wardle’s idea of identity within this community comes into play as that I feel that many people are very blunt and honest about their feelings in this community especially because they are behind a computer screen. There is one blog I read about how a woman is having trouble with her cold feet about getting engaged at an early age and how she wants to explore other people but loves her man and I feel as if she is lying to herself about her cold to justify wanting to go apeshit crazy and live her glory years and that there are things she hides from the community…. and I want to investigate that. This is where my lens and the psychology in cyberspace theory come into play. I feel as if people when behind a computer screen, feel as if they will not be judged by strangers so they post about these things in order to seek advice without having to reveal their true selves to their everyday acquaintances and friends. We want to be loved and accepted in life and the fact that love and acceptance could be lost by sharing our feelings scares us so we go to people whom we do not care to lose (such as people in this community) for advice and venting.
0037
ReplyDeleteThe framing lens that I am most eager to discuss was the underlying concepts of disinhibition found in John Suler’s, The Psychology of Cyberspace. Through analyzing the different factions within in his piece I have come to a consensus that his points and overall arguments serve as prime evidence and support to assuming a specific role in an online discourse community. Starting with his original concept of disinhibition, Suler defines this ideology as the tendency for individuals to “loosen up, feel more uninhibited, and express themselves more openly.” He then creates a sub-argument to support his statement with the two principles of dissociative anonymity and invisibility which are two factors that play a huge role in almost all online discourse communities. Although many would agree that the two principles are very similar and overlap in the sense of anonymity, Suler is effectively able to differentiate between the two in saying the dissociative anonymity is simply the ability so disconnect your image with your actions while invisibility allows an individual to say and do as they please with out having to worry about what people are thinking. These two ideas would later come back together when Suler introduces one of his more intriguing issues with the subject of ones “true self”. Ultimately I believe that if I am effectively able to use Sulers tactics to distinguish between the multiple participants of my new online discourse community I will find myself to be rather successful. There are many different concepts that need to be considered and I believe Suler does a great job at illustrating what those concepts actually are.
With my earlier reference to the use of Sulers principles I have began to incorporate his ideas into the way at which I view my community. In the America’s Greatest Sports Fan community, it seems as if many of these principles are taking place but on a lower level. The aspect that I have begun to realize is that it is very hard for sports fans to claim a general authority over one another within the community. Many find themselves simply stating opinions that are usually biased in the direction of what their favorite team is. When topics are brought up about certain individuals within the sports world many people take a different approach to their responses. For example, with the recent injury that took place in the ALCS to future Hall-Of-Famer Derek Jeter, many people, regardless of what team they rooted for, were upset to see such a tragedy happen to such an in complete respect of Jeter himself. I am beginning to realize that it is going to be a bit of a challenge to try and display the principles used by Suler in this type of community but through further analysis I am sure I will find something that sparks so correlation.
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ReplyDelete0037
ReplyDeleteI will be using many of the authors we have previously talked about to analyze my online discourse community will be framed from the articles we have read during this unit. James Gee’s text will help to distinguish Discourse and the smaller discourses that make up this community. Wardle’s reading she talks about having an identity and authority in the community and how you have to have an identity and authority in the community. If you don’t have any sort of authority or identity in the community then you truly aren’t considered part of the community because you cannot take part in the community. To have authority in a community is to be able to be respected by the other members in the community. To have an identity in the community means to be active member of the community that interacts with others in the community. Gee also brings up the term mush-fake, this is where people fake being in the community just to say that they are a part of it. These people really aren’t welcome in the communities and I am going to see if I can find and mush-fakers in the community that I am analyzing.
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Since I will be analyzing Twitter and how people become twitter famous it seems they have made a bigger identity than they really are. From the lense created by Wardle you can see that these people really have no lives since they tweet all day and night. I've even observed people from other countries to see how they tweet and they also tweet all day and night. It's crazy. Through their tweets you can analze what the people are going through at their lives at that time and what's currently on their mind.
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ReplyDeletePart I
In the course of our collection of data from the articles that we have read so far in this chapter, I’ve realized that each author provides their own, unique perspective on discourse communities and the individuals who are related to them. But, there is one article in particular that I have chosen to aid in the analyzing process of my online discourse community. Elizabeth Wardle’s article, “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces,” provides the term “enculturation,” which I will use as an analytical framing lens.
According to Wardle, the enculturation of newcomers into a community is a very complex process. I will be using this piece as an analytical lens to determine how individuals discover their own, unique identities within discourse communities. Alignment, imagination, and engagement are three interrelated modes through which newcomers belong to communities. As I study this discourse community further, I will begin to establish a better idea of how I will complete the connection between the forum and the analytical framing lens.
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Part II
The online discourse community that I chose is GolfMkV.com, which is a forum that is dedicated to Fifth-Generation Volkswagen GTI owners and enthusiasts. This beneficial site provides a medium through which individuals can discuss and collaborate on different vehicle modifications, maintenance tips, and also share photos of their rides. This forum has tens of thousands of members from all across the globe. GolfMkV.com contains multiple threads that allow users to post discussions, advertise about upcoming events, deliver product reviews, and make suggestions to fellow users (especially newbie’s). Speaking of newbie’s, that’s exactly how the analytical framing lens, “enculturation,” relates to this discourse community. Many newcomers to GolfMkV.com will attempt to become an equal member of the online space by posting and introductory paragraph, focusing on their ride and its modifications. But, this action usually separates the newcomers from the more-experienced users since they most likely have not made any modifications to their GTI. As I progress in this assignment, I will determine what factors contribute to online identities as well as enculturation of new members.
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ReplyDeletePart 1-
The framing lens I am using to analyze the online community I have chosen is Elizabeth Wardle’s “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces”. For one to have authority in a community, they must participate frequently. This is how you build an identity for yourself in the community. Whether your input is positive or negative, this participation reflects upon the identity you obtain in the community. I am also going to use the framing lens of Wardle’s idea of engagement. When becoming a new member of a community, one must learn to adapt. There may be life long members who you can learn from such as ways to interact and get involved.
Part 2-
I have chosen the online community called Tribesports. This community involves people who share an interest in fitness. On the home page there is a live stream showing whenever someone finishes a fitness “challenge”. As I was researching this community, I noticed many of the same faces on the live stream because they were finishing multiple challenges. This is a way to form an identity in the community. By being active in this community, they are also collecting an abundance of “followers”. Being a “follower” in this community is a way to get motivated and learn training methods from other members. Engaging in this community as a new member, you can gain inspiration by just seeing the achievements of other members.
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ReplyDeletePart 1
James Paul Gee- “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics:”
Elizabeth Wardle- “Identifying, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces”
I will be using this piece as the main guideline for my study because Gee’s theory of the Capital discourse and lower case discourse really jumped out to me and I feel it will relate well to the study I am doing. Gee states that a capitol discourse is an identity kit and these are used to see how people communicate. Not grammar wise but instead “saying (writing)- doing- being- valuing- believing combinations.” Because I am researching a sports blog by understanding these discourses I can start to profile bloggers and comprehend their values and beliefs. I will also pull from Wardle’s writing on how new members will immerse themselves in this new blog as well as what dictates authority in this sphere. How is this authority gained and how it can be lost as well.
Overall I want to use both of those pieces to begin to see what makes up someone’s profile, most likely how they write, their tone as well as content. What discourses or Discourses are used to make these profiles. To build of that after someone makes up an identity how are they viewed in the community and what makes people authoritative figures.
Part 2
Though I recently changed subjects because the one I started to research was turning into a dead end I have had some time to recognize and familiarize myself with my new blog. The new blog I will be researching is the “Bleacher Report.” This is a spots blog about all the new and current events happening in all sports, domestic and worldwide. The blogs are set up with one main article posted by the website themselves about a relevant sports story and people comment and interact on threads of the original story. What I hope to do throughout my study is to see how people interact on this blog. What kinds of tones are used and what are the most picked views on issues. I hope to use Gee’s “identity kit” to start to profile frequent bloggers and see what sides the pick on issues.
omo8
ReplyDeleteHaving to change my information source as well I am glad to see that I am not the only one. Using Gee's Kit as you called it will be helpful. Discourse is very important but for me this is second nature. discourse has always been around and is not a new idea. I feel that learning about Gee is more of a summation of what we have learned in school. But for a blog using discourse will be a great boost to your analysis. Blogging is still relatively new and the ideas incorporated have yet been fully digested into the psyche of the public. I like how you will pull from other authors we have read from an incorporate it into your paper.
0119
ReplyDeleteSince my community I am going to be able to use any part of Suler’s article, but I will use the Identity and authority from Wardle’s article and certain things from Gee’s article as well.
First I would like to start off with Etienne Wenger from Wardle’s article. He describes three modes of belonging, and the one that pertains to my study is “engagement”. He basically describes engagement as the ability of new and old people within the organization to develop “interpersonal relationships” and have good interaction with one another. This is going to play a major role in my study because some people are as far as six years apart and the level of experience also varies. Wenger also lists “alignment”, or finding common ground, which is also important because in order to be successful in the community I am studying, there can’t be a lot of disagreement going on.
The two big things in Wardle’s article are identity and authority. Authority plays a big role in my community; and in order to have authority, you must have an identity of a leader. There are three different types of identities in my community: instructor, leader, and follower.
Pt.2
ReplyDeleteI was really struggling to find of a good online community to study, so I am going study the drumline here at UCF. Since I am a member of it and know how things work and run, I will be able to really to study the interaction between everyone and point out special words that pertain to drumming that is commonly used between us drummers, but not by anyone else.
Like I said identity and authority plays a big role in how things operate. We have a main instructor who writes music, and directs us on what to do when we practice; A drumline captain who keeps us in line during practice; captains in each section of the drumline (for example bass drum captain, snare captain, cymbal captain, etc.); and followers, who have no authoritative say and just follow instructions. Since there are – people on the drumline you can see why engagement and alignment are both very crucial to our success. I am not sure how to classify this but I have noticed that everyone is much more laid back during practice, and we as individuals all have our game faces; both physically and mentally things change on game day. The physical side is that we are all in uniform on game day. The mental side is that we become much more serious and cocky. The cockiness I believe has to do with the fact that everyone loves a good drumline and the fact that every girl wants to take a picture with you and your drum. The drums seem to be a giant ego booster because all the fans flock to us when we play and we reflect it in the way we act, but as soon as we take off the drums people see us as just another person in the band and we as individuals are no longer cocky.