These three online articles describe an individual community the writer belongs to or another individual belongs to. Writer Kima Jones, in the first article, talks about poetry and
poets. She describes her poet’s community as a colored community, and that they
need to write to a white or universal human community. Kima did not like the
idea of not being able to write how she truly feels through her eyes. So Kima
found twitter, a social media sight where she and many other poets could find their
voice and share it to their community. She talks about how a simple re-tweet
can spread a piece of poetry to many individuals. The second writer, Erin, was
a mom and she was talking about how posts on social media can be fake, she
called this “fakebooking”. This is very clever and very true. Erin was speaking
to a mother’s community. She talked about how she wanted to post a beautiful
picture of her happy smiling kids, but it would give the wrong message to other
moms who would see her post. She would be giving the message to other moms in
her community that she was having a blast with her kids, but in reality the
kids were being terrors. In the end she decided using social media to post the
pictures, but write about the truth. The final article was hosted by Audie
Cornish, but had a guest speaker Beverly Gooden. This article talked about
hashtag activism, something I have never heard of, but had seen trending
hashtags, not seening this as activism. The hashtag gone viral, came from
Gooden, as she posted on twitter #WhyIstayed in her domestic violent relationship.
What struck her to start that hashtag was the Ray Rice video and how everyone
felt okay to start in on the woman who is the victim, but still stayed. Well
not only did the domestic violence community respond to #whyIstayed, they
started a two new hashtags, #whyIleft and #whenIleft. Just one simple hashtag
on a social media sight got a whole community together for the world, or anyone
who was on twitter to see this message.
In
Harris’s writing a few quotes stood out to me about the discourse of a community.
One was “what ‘discourse community’ means is far less clear," and “thus while community loses its rooting in a particular place, it
gains a new sense of direction and movement.” With social media in mind,
Harris would say these three communities are creating a discourse in a new way
and that is so the public can directly see what they are doing, without getting
out of their seats. Social media is a community within itself and each sight
has many different communities within. I am apart of Facebook and instagram,
these are my social media drugs of choice. But I have made my own discourse
community for myself within each of these social media sights. I get to pick my
friends who I want to follow and who can follow me, and I can block users and
set up my security any way I like. Each
of these sites became communities the moment I made my account. I then allowed
myself to decide what I wanted my community to look like.
I love your construction of social media as a "drug of choice." What a metaphor that has so many potential implications if we extended it to think about the ways in which social media might be like a drug.
ReplyDeleteSo in your case, do you feel like one of y our discourse communities, for example instagram, was created fully around you? Did your creation of an account, I mean, create the community? Or did you somehow join a community of existing users on one hand, but also create other communities as you became more of a user of the site? I'm thinking, for example, that with instagram somewhat of a community of users already existed and we know this because they shared the discourse of things like hashtags or photos with those filters on them. This all makes me think of Harris' point about communities moving and shifting and overlapping--how were you both the starter of your instagram community and a joiner of an existing one and how does the discourse you use or see used tell you this?