After reading these three social media articles, I am quite
surprised by the communities the people featured are making. All three are
trying to create a community where you are yourself and you aren’t trying to
hide anything. Gooden says “I think the beauty of hashtag activism is that it
creates an opportunity for sustained engagement” (Hashtag Activism). She was
creating a community of purpose, purpose to be yourself and own who you are.
Ruddy was also creating an environment where everything isn’t always peachy in
her household, she was trying to be real and authentic on Facebook but no
posting something that made building the snowman look like it was fun when it
wasn’t.
Harris says “Community becomes a kind of stabilizing term,
used to give a sense of shared purpose and effort to our dealings with the
various discourses that make up the university” (14) I believe these authors
have a purpose of trying to show the real you and take the mask off that some
people have which means that they are a community with a shared purpose.
I also think that Harris would say that these authors are
activist or teachers of their communities, their communities being the social
media community, or the community of friends. Harris says this about teachers “The
task facing our students is not to leave one community in order to enter
another but to reposition themselves in relation to several continuous and
conflicting discourses. Our goals as teachers need not be to initiate our
students into the vales and practices of some new community but to offer them
the chance to reflect critically on those discourse to which they already
belong” (19) That is exactly what these authors are trying to do. They are not
trying to place blame or shame on their online communities, they are just
trying to have people think about what they are doing on the internet and to
make sure they are being true to themselves.
I am a part of my secondary English cohort
community online which was shaped by our commonality in programs at UNL. This
community became possible by the fact that it is easy to communicate on
Facebook and easy to communicate fast. I am also part of many Lincoln buying
and selling groups which are created by people wanting to buy and sell things
close to where they live. I also believe that I am a part of a twitter
community that was created to keep people close informed on what is going on in
their lives. All of these communities were created to help people communicate
from all different places to each other in a fast and friendly manner. The
convenience factor is what keeps these communities alive.
I hadn't thought of thinking of the authors of these various social media sites as teachers. In his article, Harris is talking to college teachers, suggesting that we shouldn't try to for students to learn to. Right just like "academics." He's suggesting we need to knowledge that students – – actually everyone – – is always inhabiting multiple discourse communities at once. I think you're right though, we could think of thesesocial media authors as teachers in someway, as they are trying to share a particular ideas with their audience. If this is the case though, do we think of their discourse differently? That is, Do we think of what they say or how they say it as having more weight or authority?
ReplyDeleteI'm also still really interested in the way your English education cohort is using Facebook to build community. I would imagine you are developing a particular discourse that you share only among yourselves. So it's not just that you share a single goal, you also share a way of thinking and talking about the world. Period. At least in the space of the Facebook group.