English Blog #2

The people in the social media readings are all creating identities for themselves through social media in different ways.  For the mother and her children in the article, Why I didn’t post this photo, it was her choice to decide if she wanted to build an identity for herself that showed that she always had a wonderful time with her children or if she decided not to show others a “lie” by pretending that they did in fact always have a wonderful time.  She chose to create the identity that showed both the good and the bad, that she was a good mother attempting to do activities with her children and also the struggles behind each happy go lucky post and photo.  For the poets in the article, Writers of color flock to social media, they are creating an identity for themselves through their poetry and then conveying it across social media.  Through every aspect of the poem including geography, history and language they are creating their identity as a poet and then sharing it with readers.  For Bev Gooden in, Hashtag activism, she very strongly built an identity for herself that spread through twitter as a women who was taking a stand against domestic violence.  She built her identity through three conjoined words; whyIstayed and as a women who had overcome domestic abuse and now wanted to bring awareness to the subject and to those who are still experiencing it.  They are creating discourse communities because they are writing about something outside of themselves and they are bringing awareness to issues and raising concerns, As Harris states in his article: “rather than viewing the intentions of a writer as private and ineffable, wholly individual, they have helped us to see that it is only through being part of some ongoing discourse that we can, as individual writers, have things like points to make and purposes to achieve”.  They are creating communities of people who are interested or connect to what these people are writing about.  The only online community I am a part of is Facebook.  The discourse that marks this community is a group of friends or acquaintances that may or may not have similar interests who comment on, or discuss things that people write that interest them.  They may be very casual subjects such as how their day was or what they had for breakfast or they could be more intense postings such as letting others know about the death of a relative or posting something that could be politically upsetting.  Discourse shapes these communities by creating discussion and topics to be written about, otherwise it would be a blank slate because without outside things going on in people’s lives they would have no topics or issues to address and others would have no responses to them as Harris states in his article: “We write not as isolated individuals but as members of communities whose beliefs, concerns, and practices both instigate and constrain, at least in part, the sorts of things we can say”.   I imagine that facebook became a community through the need to keep in touch with others and be able to continue connections and therefor continue communication with others, which requires discourse.

 

Two quotes from Harris’ article that I used to help me answer these questions were:

“rather than viewing the intentions of a writer as private and ineffable, wholly individual, they have helped us to see that it is only through being part of some ongoing discourse that we can, as individual writers, have things like points to make and purposes to achieve”

I think this is a very important point because I think it’s very true that without things outside of the writers self, there would not be much to write about and it would be much harder for others to connect to a writers writings.

 

And

 

“We write not as isolated individuals but as members of communities whose beliefs, concerns, and practices both instigate and constrain, at least in part, the sorts of things we can say”

Without having communities of people that share similar beliefs, concerns and practices writers audiences would be considerably smaller, so in order to have these things in common it creates things for writers to write about.