After reading John Swales “The Concept of Discourse Communities I believe that we can examine different groups of people and determine if they could in fact be called a discourse community. John Swales says a discourse community must have all six defining characteristics to be classified as a discourse community. Those characteristics include having a broadly agreed set of common public goals, having mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, using its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information, utilize and possess one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aim, an acquired specific lexis, and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.
An example of a discourse community would be any fandom. Examples of this would be beliebers for musician Justin Bieber, Z Legends for actress Zendaya, Red Sox Nation for the Boston Red Sox baseball team, and Thronies for the tv show Game Of Thrones. Each of these fandoms and others are discourse communities.
Starting with the first characteristic of a discourse community fandom‘s do you share the common public goal of supporting their team, musician, and TV shows. People in these fandom‘s will support by watching performances and buying merchandise. They all help build the fandom through that common goal of support. As we take a look at the second and third characteristics, most of these fandom‘s have a website or blog to share information to build upon knowledge or keep others updated on the day to day news.Diving into that fourth trait for fandoms they not only wear merchandise; but listening to the music or rewatching games to track stats.
All fandoms have a lexis as well. Terms and inside jokes that would only be known to that community. For instance, as a belieber myself I know what someone is saying when they say ‘You know where we ball?’ and how I’d respond back to the saying itself. In terms of the expertise level of a fandom its all about the knowledge and longevity. Did a fan stay loyal in during the hard times and continue to support or did they high tail out of there at the first chance. Does the fan know only common knowledge or the harder to get information that isn’t easily accessible.
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