Discourse Community

            This article was so difficult for me to understand and I can understand the forehand warning about how dry it is. I had to repeatedly read it over and over yet, I am still trying to understand it as I write this blog. I feel like the beginning of every blog or paper I have to write it takes me a couple hours to days to form the right thoughts which really stinks.

Discourse Community consists of:

1. A broadly agreed set of common public goals
2. Mechanisms of intercommunication among its members
3. Uses its participatory mechanism primarily to provide information and feedback
4. Utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims
5. Acquired some specific lexis
6. Has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise

From my understanding, it was said that a discourse community share a “cluster of ideas”, in which contribute to the group’s knowledge as a whole, it then made me wonder if this is why it can be confused with speech community. It is confusing because when I think of a speech community, I think of a group of people who shares the same lingos/genres and often communicates that way inherently. A discourse community also consists of members who speaks and know a specific lexis. But that is probably the only similarity between the two.

As a “discourse community is not well defined as yet, but like many imperfectly defined terms, it is suggestive, the center of a set of ideas rather than the sign of a settled notion”, it made me realize further that a discourse community is indeed “functional”. It is functional because the sociorhetorical discourse community consists of members who agree on and pursue goals rather than to discuss or socialize. I had to separately look into the dictionary and other internet sources to understand the difference between a speech community and a discourse community and I am glad because it helped me tremendously.

When applying what a discourse community is, I think of myself in various classes at San Diego State. When I join a classroom, I experience a common goal with other students such as passing a class and hopefully, graduating. Within the classroom, we are able to discuss ideas and give feedbacks to each other and our professors. In addition, depending on what major and class I am in, I am always required to understand and communicate the genre(s) with my fellow classmates. For example, in my Economic class, we are able to speak and understand about the “demand and supply” genre while being able to casually explaining it to those who aren’t familiar with the terms and are new to the subject. The survival of each major depends on how much a major itself can attract or persuade new potential members in joining its community.

I think the many genres within our discourse community is impressive such as the use of emails, social media and meetings in order to achieve the common goal we have. I get invites to groups on Facebook when I attend a certain class and when I open the discussion forum, I see a chain of communication in various types of genres such as questions, study guide and class information that can help further each and every single one of us to our common goal. Which is a very neat concept as we are functioning individually but as a whole group, we specify our specialties.

Unlike a discourse community, I can think of a speech community as a group someone was born into or involved in just for the basic human needs of socialization to survive. Such groups such as the Nazis, KKKs or cults are example of a speech community that comes together for a goal(s), however, such common goal(s)/belief(s) are often outdated and not relevant in today’s society. Their chain of communication is narrowed with falsely believed information passed onto their vulnerable and misinformed members. However, they do seem to have a common genre(s) when speaking about their commonality towards their goals.