After reading about discourse communities I wondered to myself, are there discourse communities within internet culture? First, what is a discourse community? A discourse community is basically a group of people who discuss similar ideas, share similar goals, and can even have their own dialect within their group. For example, as a college student I belong to a couple discourse communities, which would be that of my friends, my animal biology major, and fans of the band Muse. From the definition of discourse communities and my self given example, I would say that yes, internet culture does hold discourse communities within itself.
The first discourse community in internet culture that I want to mention is the Youtube community of animators. This community focuses on uploading self created animated content for their fans and viewers and receiving revenue from their work. The animation community consists of different channels made from different people who have their own unique style but share similar goals. For example these animators aim to dish out videos for their fans in order to keep their channels alive, especially since some of the animators treat their channel as their main job considering the fact that they are able to receive money from their videos since they can be monetized by Youtube. The Youtube animation community also communicate with each other through collaboration videos where they share their animation styles in a single video. This discourse community has recently been brought closer from the fact that Youtube’s new algorithm prefers for channels to upload constantly, especially videos that are ten minutes or longer. This issue has brought the community closer because animators require a lot of time to create videos and since they can’t release videos constantly, their revenue decreases. The community as a whole has taken up on the goal to fix the Youtube algorithm that hurts their work.
One of the biggest internet cultures has to be online forums, and I beleive online forums hold multiple discourse communities. Reddit is a website where many different “subreddits” (a forum dedicated on a specific topic) are held. There are subreddits dedicated to gaming, music, fashion, news, and even subreddits dedicated to cats and dogs separately. I believe Reddit holds many discourse communities where a lot of people can take part in. For example the gaming subreddit on Reddit is a community filled by people who are interested in gaming, and it is a place where they can share their favorite gaming moments and receive help when encountering technical issue. Reddit also holds more “serious” subreddits where communities get more political and can talk about political issues and news. Those who go on reddit can be part of many discourse communities by subscribing to subreddits, and can comment, like, and post in relation to the communities they are taking part in. No one is limited to a community, and that is what makes discourse communities on the internet special. Sure you can be part of many discourse communities in real life, but the internet makes access to many different communities easier and efficiently.
Into My Mind 