Speech Community Contribution
There is an infinite amount of chat rooms available on the internet and each one can be defined as its own speech community. I have chosen to analyze a chat room that is devoted to the hit Fox reality show, American Idol. The transcript used was from a chat session that occurred at 10:00 PM on March 27, 2005. This online chat room seemed to be the source of a continuous flow of opinionated statements regarding the television show.
Due to the anonymity of the internet, members of the many speech communities within are uneasily identified. Members tend to rely solely on “screen names” for identification purposes. With names such as TanBear251 and MegaBob12, most statistical information regarding the identity of participants is limited. The context and purpose of the chat room, however, allow for various limited conclusions to be drawn. For the American Idol chat room, it can be assumed that participants include people who watch the television show regularly. These people are likely to statistically fall into the show’s target audience in regards to age and income, among other factors. The target audience of American Idol consists of middle to upper-middle class viewers between the ages of 20 and 45 years of age.
No physical location can truly be defined for this speech event. One participant may reside in Houston, Texas, while another may live in Puerto Rico. Due to the time of day, a casual setting can be assumed since it is likely that most participants are located within their own homes. Participation is fully voluntary and in most cases is for enjoyment purposes.
For this chat room in particular, knowledge truly is power. The status of a participant grows with their expertise on a subject of discussion. The chat room “regulars” seem to hold a higher status that those who are entering for the first time. This is seen with the amount of posted messages a person makes. Those who regularly participate in the chat room from day to day dominate the discussion while newcomers tend to sit back and watch. In order to gain inclusion in a discussion, one must prove themselves as knowledgeable about the subject at hand.
Some of the barriers that coexist with chat room communication include a limited ability to show emotion as well as a tedious typing requirement. To address these issues, many new abbreviated expressions have been introduced.
A discourse community has an agreed set of common public goals. It is a group of individuals that have a specific way of interacting and communicating with one another. It is also used as a means to maintain and extend a group’s knowledge, as well as initiate new members into the group. Specific kinds of languages are used as a form of social behavior. Such discourse communities vary in size, purpose and importance.
In the article, “Does Im Make U dum”, the author states how instant messaging has made us become “dum”. The issue of using popular texting abbreviations like, “lol”, “brb”, or “gtg” can either be an effective or unproductive way of expression. Using abbreviations through texting are so commonly used by children, teenagers, and adults. Statistics show that children are younger than ever for when they are first exposed to mobile phones and text messaging. A 2005 ChildWise study that one-in-four children under the age of eight had a mobile phone.
Conversation Analysis (CA) is the study of talk-within-interaction that attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction in conversation. It is a method of qualitative analysis developed by Harvey Sacks with the aid of Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Using the CA frame of mind to view stories shows us that what we may think to be simplistic relaying of information or entertaining our friends is in fact a highly organised social phenomena that is finely tuned in a way that expresses the teller’s motivation behind the talk. (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2011). It is suggested that CA relies on three main assumptions; talk is a form of social action, action is structurally organised, talk creates and maintains inter-subjectivity (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984).
In both the film and novel, "Speak" by Lauren Halsen Anderson uses literary devices to demonstrate the experience the protagonist, Melinda Sordino faced as a teenage rape victim, as well as the steps necessary to cope and move on with her life. Both film and book share a great similarity in the conflict that goes on, as well as the flash backs indicated throughout this piece of work. Also, the symbolism shaped by the protagonist makes it more clear to understand the tramautic event. Moreover, the novel and film appears to be both familiar in many ways due to these elements followed by examples.
In the article“Speech Communities” by Paul Roberts, he uses examples in the text to helps give his audience an understanding of what a exactly speech community is and how they are formed in our lives.
Laurie Halse Andersons, Speak, published in 1999 educates the reality of which we must speak out to be heard. Presumptively the novel is set in the late 90's at Merryweather high school in Syracuse New York. Protagonist, Melinda Sordino, narrates her story as a sexual assault victim. We journey through her freshman year and watch her suffer to find her lost voice and overcome her negative convictions . While her persona is revealed, we see that the rape forces change on Melinda through violence. Several months of self mutilation and bitter silence, she finally speaks up for herself and confronts her antagonist. Melinda's introspection through her art allows growth and she becomes a survivor. Her recovery nonetheless was tough and protracted.
Literature Review In “The Concept of Discourse Community,” Swales begins by introducing the discourse community. Speech communities share information and knowledge regarding speech. Swales described six main characteristics of a discourse community. It is important to understand these six characteristics because they are used to describe any discourse community that you are analyzing. In Erik Borg’s “Discourse Community” peer review journal, there are some similarities as well as key differences from Swales work.
Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, is first-person narrative about overcoming our habits and misfortunes. It takes place at Merryweather High over the course of a year. The main character, Melinda, is a fourteen year-old, who is just starting high school. She is introduced, at first, as someone who doesn’t speak to anyone, almost, at all. All the other people in the high school seem to detest her. They say hateful things to her and throw objects at her. She seems not bothered by any of this. She is in her own being.
. Cyberspace is a realm of communication. Cyberspace is like its own way of talking. People are part of this cyberspace as well. I say this because humans don’t really talk in person anymore. Do humans intentionally do this to the community or were it unintentional, and we were just consumed without knowing? Intentional is something done with a purpose or pertaining to it. Unintentional is something done by accident or no reason. A community is built by people with a purpose, or it can be built by accident because people decided it would be a good idea. The purpose of this essay is to explain the difference in an unintentional and intentional community and how the author feel about these two different types of communities.
The public sphere has been falsely represented as a virtual place where one can share and debate opinions; ...
A means of convincing people of such is known as Ethos. Turkle expresses ethos initially by stating, “I’ve been studying psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, I’ve had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather test than talk” (Turkle Par. 3)? Even without reading the article or knowing what her opinion is, readers now know that Turkle has spent years studying in this field along with half a decade studying face-to-face conversations. Sherry Turkle has passed the first step to winning an argument by proving that she is a trustworthy source of information, but she has not won the entire argument
An online community is a place where individual users with common interest come together to build relationships with similar people. Recently I was looking through the Yahoo and MSN websites, searching for an interesting community to join. Unfortunately, all of the message boards I was interested in had been inactive for over a year. Online communities must involve growing relationships among active users. Many people believe that online communities are a waste of time and are destroying our current society. Howard Rheingold, an author, argues another point of view (92).
Public discourse is necessary for the formation of ideas and shaping and modification of thinking. Social media loses the personal interaction and protects those creating statements which may eventually become integrated into law by avoiding confrontation and criticism. Therefore, according to Ott, “Twitter breeds dark, degrading, and dehumanizing discourse; it breeds vitriol and violence; in short, it breeds Donald Trump”. Public discourse changes based on the contribution of different views. However, social media can “produce a uniformed, uncritical, and irresponsible electorate”. According to Ott,“the Age of Twitter virtually guaranteed the rise of Trump”. Therefore, ideas reinforced through twitter can give rise to real world political consequences and changes in government policy. Moreover, the age of twitter makes it ever more difficult for marginalized communities to overcome algorithm barriers and limited access to the internet. “Search engines are not egalitarian. Algorithms.,. are gatekeepers to their message.” Causes which gain attention go viral while others are silenced. Additionally, anchoring people to a territory traditionally facilitated easier processes to deliver rights to a particular people. With the emergence of online social movements, allocating rights becomes increasingly more difficult. Furthermore, twitter is rapidly becoming the accepted as a principle source of news and is being treated as newsworthy by the mainstream media despite featuring false information. Therefore, this new form of discourse will have serious consequences or marginalized
One unique trait given to the online community is that anyone can leave a comment regardless of content and not be seen by anyone who reads it. A problem with communicating online is that no one is seen however studies have shown that having the feeling of being watched can improve coop...
In the last twenty-five years, advancements in technology combined with the unbridled growth of social media, has dramatically altered not only the methods used to communicate but the linguistics as well. The meteoric rise in the use of new media sources have resulted in the creation of a type of shorthand English. With today’s social media, abbreviations such as LOL, OMG, BRB, and ROFL are easily recognizable by its followers yet remain a mystery to those not connected. The preference of the younger generation for social media such as texting, Twitter, and Facebook over face–to-face communication has not only had an effect on communication skills, but has also led to a further disconnect with the adult population. Twenty years ago, when a family went out to dinner it was considered family time; an opportunity for all the family members to get caught up with what was going on in each other’s life. Today, watching that same family outing, one is much more likely to see each of them sitting at the same table, looking down at a smart phone texting, and very little if any co...