Essay On Discourse Community

The Trust of a Discourse Community

How do groups of people in our society all interact with each other? There are so many different ways people communicate, whether by writing, speaking, or even educating. As John Swales, James Paul Gee, and James E. Porter express, it all has to do with the concept and involvement of a discourse community. The process of common goals and purposes being constructed with the knowledge gathered in a discourse community and expanded by literacy, linguistics, and experience. The authors, Swales, Gee, and Porter, all emphasize key characteristics that they believe best describe a discourse community. Yet, their characterization leaves behind a controversy on both legitimate control and trust a discourse community

provides for its members. These controls and placements of trust ultimately led to the influences of communication. The dispute being raised against discourse communities is to identify the true motives behind their purposes, values, and facets; and the reason members accept them as true.
A discourse community can be seen as a group, a lifestyle, a manipulation, or an attempt to exercise ones will.

Swales, Gee and Porter all give their understanding of how they believe a discourse community operates and contributes to society. It can be seen as a type of language used to connect between particular groups and integrate social identities into the world (Gee 484). The building of a discourse community starts with creating a type of communication plan. It is necessary that all members connect and confer alike in order to maintain a set of documented decisions and actions. A discourse community connects people to a lifestyle and provides a form of order that stretches the interconnections of words, writings, values, attitudes, and beliefs (Swales 220). Those interconnecting contacts though sometimes conflict with select purposes of other discourses, leading to confusion or even anarchy. When this occurs, awareness and a choice of acceptance or doubt sets into place (Porter 400). For a discourse community to continue all doubt and awareness have to be tracked and suppressed. The discourse community needs to insure that its values are well convinced and received by its members and potential new members, in order to remain accepted in a

community.
The first draft of anything is far from perfect and liable to change. Just as written, first drafts are revised; the values and ideas of a discourse will be revised over time. Obtaining the true past or present motives and attitudes of a discourse community is an extraordinarily ambiguous process. The change in attitudes and values can stem from a motive to gain control or arise from the discovery of new education supported with stronger beliefs. This occurrence may lead a discourse to start with a rational concept but then over time cause a corruptive transformation of values; which ultimately disputes the degree of trust that should be placed on the discourse community.
There should be different ways of writing and different ways of communication. Different discourses will have diverse ideas or theories of how their form of communication will flow in society. Gee elaborates on how members belonging to two discourses can cause interference in the “intercommunication among its members” (486). Religious groups are a perfect example of how different discourse communities have various communication characteristics. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have distinct books that create a layout of communication for their members. Each book has particular rules and goals for their members to follow, and what sets these different discourse communities apart are the thoroughly worked out systems of principles, theories, and managements they have created. Theories created or discovered in a discourse have to be well integrated so that they no longer are presented as theories, but more as truths. This is why a discourse community has to be wary of the members it accepts. It has to be able to convince its theories with the same communication plan, without any sway of doubt.
With the idea of a primary and secondary discourse, the methods and reasons of “mushfaking” come to use. Primary and secondary discourses arise when individuals try to belong to several discourse communities (Swales 225). When a member finds a secondary discourse but lacks the acquired ability to enter the community they mushfake off the ideas of their primary discourse community in order to produce a benefit toward there real desired discourse. Mushfaking is how people do with something less when the real want is unavailable (Gee 490). Members in a discourse community who use the concept of mushfaking will pretend that their primary discourse connects with their own values and beliefs. People manipulate their ways into discourse communities in order to gain a sense of popularity and money. This leads into the idea of spies or “double agents” being implicated into discourses (Gee 490).
In order to maintain a sense of control, the discourse has to know who’s who.

Handling the problem of mushfaking and spies, the discourse community has to keep tabs on everything going on around and make sure all members are act appropriately. This can lead to forms of judgment and rapid insight being placed on the members behind locked doors. This can cause a disconnect between what the members know and what they do. Gee expands on how being in a discourse means actively complying with all of their values (490). The idea of all or nothing, that if a member is not fully involved then the member is not part of the discourse. Swales brings up this idea with his six criteria, in which if all six characteristics are not implemented into the discourse community then the group is not an authentic discourse (222). The Initiation of members is hard because a discourse has to look out for spies. They look for how strongly a member is willing to cooperate and how much they want to connect with the group. People choose to join a discourse community but a discourse will choose the people based off their true collective ideas and true intentions. The act of mushfaking keeps a member from being all connected to the group, thus keeps them from contributing to common goals or values the community

presents.
When people enter into a religious or cultic group, people want to believe it is true. The established writings and teachings are all set up to make a person want to believe. A discourse community is looking for people who will easily accept their purposes and concepts are true. They also look for members who convey and convince their values the best. A discourse has to maintain control of the community; by keeping track of the communication its members are educated in. If a member gains awareness of the true motives for control a discourse community may have, they could become an outsider toward their values and forgo the community altogether. But no one is truly outside a discourse community. Even if a person does not belong to a particular community, there is probably someone else on the outside; and together they are their own discourse community.
This stems off the concept Porter explains as, “there is no originality” (395). All discourse communities rely on experience. The religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all seem to have different forms of communication but they all stem from the idea of a higher power and away to make sense of place in the universe. The term of intertextuality is the idea that all text branches off of other texts and that no text is truly original work. The theory is people just stem ideas off of past works or concepts and that everyone is doomed to plagiarize from the start (Porter 395). So in a discourse community there is no self-idea that exists.
Should people put their trust in discourse communities? Discourse communities operate by convincing, educating, and controlling. For a discourse to maintain control it has to organize a way to handle problems that arise from members. It has to keep expanding on its role of communication, so that doubt and awareness do not develop. It has to find a way to dilute members’ issues and continue to aid and support its values. Putting trust in discourse communities is accepting the fact their values and motives are correct. Their communication of words, writings, attitudes, and beliefs are transferred to the new members and the process of supporting the values of a discourse community is put into effect. It is one thing to acknowledge the vast power of discourse communities but quite another to place complete trust in something so seemingly concealed.