Community Communication

Community Communication Profile

Community Communication Profile

Introduction

A community is a group of people who have common interests, goals and values.

A discourse community is a social group that communicates its common interests, goals and values through a shared vocabulary, either in writing or orally.

Discussion

A discourse community is a distinguished body that shares rules and language for their communications; the rules and language are usually internal to the community, and participants have to standardize their discussions within the parameters set by the discourse community in order to successfully join in the conversation.1 Although originally developed by linguists interested in speech habits, the term can be applied to several different arenas of communication.

The development of new discourse communities can serve positive ends, but discourse communities create risks as well. In our own work on the narratives of people with interests in health care, for example, we find that patients speak of their illness experiences as victims of circumstance; policy makers construct adverse experiences and challenges as opportunities to be taken; health care workers speak from a mixed perspective, seeing themselves as both victims and opportunists depending on context. To be trapped within the discourse of a particular community is to put at risk the ability to communicate across discourses. Membership of a discourse community can impair the habit of critique, and deny opportunities for heteroglossic discourse. Privileging critique as a mode of discourse perhaps might define the ethical community, suggesting that ethical community may be an antidote to the constraining effects of conventional discourse community.

Discourse communities affect the way in which their members define problems and formulate solutions, i.e. acquire, transform and produce not only language but also knowledge. The norms, conventions and expectations of a discourse community constrain the options of the members, but they also enable the communication of problem solutions and opinions. The influence goes in the other direction too: the members build up the community's framework of norms, conventions and expectations, reproduce and adjust it in their interaction or alter it if necessary. For this reason, besides the official and dominant forms of discourse there are also less official, alternative forms. Discourse communities are not necessarily harmonious, conflict-free groups at all times, and they are not always free of the unequal distribution of discursive, social or economic power either. Academic discourse communities in particular live from discussion, criticism and academic competition in the name of knowledge creation - without being totally free of power constellations.

The types of discourse communities are numerous. For example, a family is a discourse community. So are friends and co-workers. Many people participate in online discourse communities such as MySpace and Face book. Some students belong to academic discourse communities, honor societies or clubs related to their majors; other people belong to academic social networking discourse communities, such as fraternities or sororities. Still, other people belong to groups related to their personal interests: for example, car enthusiasts belong to car clubs, readers to book groups, and science fiction enthusiasts to fan ...