PROJECT 3: HOW DO COMMUNITIES SHAPE WRITING, OR HOW DOES WRITING SHAPE COMMUNITIES?
John Swales, the author of “The Concept of Discourse Communities” states that a discourse community meets six criteria, community goals, intercommunication mechanisms, communication purpose, genre, lexis, and membership diversity. Genre, in the field of composition, rhetoric, and discourse communities has a much broader definition than what people typically define genre as. Within the arguably largest discourse community of Facebook, the community often shapes the writing using the common genres that include one’s homepage, news feed, and private or direct messaging.
Kerry Dirk, the author of the article “Navigating Genres” quotes Carolyn Miller, a professor of technical communication that “a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered…on the action it is used to accomplish.” Genres are like tools to appropriately aid people in specific situations, communities of discourse, and everyday life.
The general purpose of the Facebook community involves the free flow of information sharing. However, the specific genres within the community hold individual purpose depending on what genre is used. The purposes that the “homepage” and “news feed” serves the Facebook community are similar but also different. They are similar in the fact that they both largely function off of the infamous Facebook question, “what’s on your mind?.” Through this single question sparks limitless global sharing and communication on limitless topics or ideas. They are also intertwined because whatever one decides to share or post on the news feed will also be posted to their homepage and vice versa, as long as the posting option is set to public. The differences between the genre is that the homepage is personalized and serves a purpose of social acceptance through personal expression. One typically constructs their homepage in a way that would be intriguing and socially acceptable in order to increase their number of friends.
The private or direct messaging genre serves a purpose defined in and of the genre itself. People private message information that they only want to convey to the specific respondent. Private messaging allows the user to communicate using any desired lexis or formality free from public assessment.
All communication on Facebook within every genre is mostly informal unless the purpose of a specific page deems otherwise. An example of a Facebook page that would use formal communication and lexis would include a business that uses social media for advertisement and promotional purposes, in which formality is important in order to get the desired message across. For all other genres like the news feed, homepage, and even private messaging use generally informal means of communication and a unique lexis. Examples of lexis that are specific to the Facebook community include:
-FB (When referring to the Facebook platform) e.g. “I saw it on FB”
– DM (Direct Message) e.g. “Just DM me the address”
-Tag (Notifies specific people of your activity) e.g. “I tagged you in my post, did you see it?”
The other lexis that are widely used but not specific to the Facebook community is a mostly text based lingo, abbreviating words such as oh my God(OMG), laugh out loud(LOL), and talk to you later(TTYL) to name a few.
The genres of Facebook shape the writing of the community in an open and either informal or formal way. The homepage, news feed, and private messaging genres meet the purpose, values, and beliefs within the Facebook community. Although, these purposes, values, and beliefs are relative to the individual community member, the genres allow the discourse community to consistently achieve the core community goal of information sharing in a free flow form.
References:
Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Eds. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Parlor Press, 2010. 249-262.
Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Facebook.com. “homepage. News Feed.” Bruce Kincaid, September 2, 2015
Facebook Slang. (n.d.). Retrieved September 2, 2015, from http://slangit.com/terms/facebook
