Discourse Community Map & Response

             We live in a world where everything is done electronically and done with the click of a mouse or the press of a button on a cell phone. Technology is changing every second, there are new gadgets released almost daily. It has become easier to communicate with co-workers, family, bosses, and friends through things such as Facebook, Twitter, and E-mail. It’s a new day and age, and hand written letters are seen less and less. Through all of these Internet interactions people and different groups have created their own words, and acronyms for words. For instance, TTYL -talk to you later, 2mrrw - tomorrow, and probably the most well known LOL - laugh out loud. All this new technology has helped benefit many people in different aspects of their lives weather it be work or school related whatever you may have it. Some may say it has had a negative effect but that it is totally up to the person to decide.

            In my own discourse communities I express myself differently to each one and the way I communicate and the means by which I do so are all done differently. The way I write to my work or how I talk to my bosses and coworkers is very different from how I would speak to my close friends or family or what I would post on my twitter account.  I speak and write in a respectful manner,  I do also write with respect to my family but I can still write jokes to them that my bosses or coworkers might not understand. At work for example a text I would send to one of my bosses would be, “Hey jiaya it’s Trevor, I just wanted to let you know we ran out of almonds!” Her reply might be something like; “ We are getting a delivery on Fri”. I don’t like to use short hand or acronym in texts messages with my bosses, texting it in full words is the way I communicate if not in person.

            In a different perspective I talk and write to my family completely different. Most of my family lives far from El Paso so the way I stay in touch with them is mainly through what I think is one of the most useful communicative inventions yet, Facebook. It makes talking to my dad, brothers and sisters so much easier. In one message or wall post- wall post is like a message just not private that your friends or the person to whom your sending friends may read- I can tell them everything that is going on in my life or what is happening with other family members. In my family we call each other different names that many people would find weird or not understand. Some of these names include Tirian – my sisters name Christian- it came about because when I was a young child I could not say her name properly, another name is gorilla – pronounced in Spanish a name we call my mom because she makes a monkey face. The family all has different ways of speaking and writing to each other this is probably my only community that still sends out cards for every holiday that have hand writing.

            The way I talk to my best friends is probably the community in which the way I express myself is the most grammatically incorrect. We are so close that we don’t need to text or write each other formally we can write everything informal. We can also say things that people from other generations might not understand.  For example if I were to send a text to my closest friend with the nickname Angela- the friend is a man but I call him that because of a movie we saw- I might send something saying, “Girl! DT crave @ 2!”. What this text is saying is “Downtown crave at 2 pm?”. Within that text I might include a smile face or an emoji, emojis are different expressions that you can use on IPhones, BlackBerrys, and Droids. There are probably thousands of people my age with similar communities in which they communicate the same or have and use the same genres of communication.

            Now we have come to one of my favorite discourse communities, twitter. There is not a specific audience of the twitter community; since it is on the Internet almost anyone can read what a person posts, unless it is locked. By using twitter I am able to express my thoughts and voice my opinions freely and without almost any consequences. I can use hash tags of different topics that are trending worldwide or even within a local community to allow anyone to read what I have to say about that trending topic. Something I posted this weekend about the MTV Music Video Awards was, “I’m so glad Chris Brown is making a comeback YAY!!!!!! #VMA”. Just by using the number sign before a word makes it a hash tag and allows anyone to simply push trending button and they can see all the tweets containing “#VMA”. This is also the only community I usually use profanity, or inappropriate language. I use the language of this sort on here because I know to whom I am writing and the people that immediately see it are people that I don’t think I would offend. This community is probably the most open and freely used compared to the others.
             So as you have read there are many discourse communities some that have sub communities. Almost every person on this planet has at one point or is still involved in a discourse community. Within these different communities they all use different genres and different types of speech to communicate among themselves.