Michael Militano
2/16/20
ENG1121
Word Count: 721
My Discourse Community
A discourse community is a group of people that are a part of a group, and talk about a specific topic. One of the discourse community’s that I am apart of is a basketball discourse community with my friends. In this community we talk about all things basketball from the NBA which is professional basketball to us playing in the park outside in real life. All of us in this community are involved and interested about the sport of basketball and that is what makes us a discourse community. I believe that this is a really cool community to be a part of because it is something that me and my friends can all connect on and relate to, and it makes us happy.
I researched the group by looking at old text messages in our group chats, and talking about it with one of my friends who is also in the chat. When I was researching this discourse community I noticed that we all mostly communicate through text messaging in our group chat. When messaging each other in the group chat I notice that the things that we mainly talk about are when we are going to play? , where are we going to play? , how good or bad we did that day, NBA player trades, and NBA news. We also communicate through calls or in party chat on our PlayStation 4s. Another thing that I notice when I was looking through our old messages is that we used to go play basketball almost every day, especially in the summer time. But now that we are all in College and have different schedules we play probably once or twice every two weeks, unless if we are on a break or something like that.
This discourse community is very unique in its own way, the reason why is because all of us in the community are very different. We all like different NBA players; different NBA teams, and we have different play styles in real life. Some of us share similarities outside of basketball but the one main thing that we all love and can connect to is basketball. The things that matter to this community are having basketball knowledge, the love for the sport, and friendship. I believe that all of us value our friendships with one another, our loyalty and the game of basketball.
In order to become a member of this group you would have to be one of our friends and connect with us, enjoy the sport of basketball as much as we do, and you would have to know how to play basketball. There is not really any type of process to joining this community, all you really would have to do is connect with us and become one of our friends. The type of language that we use in this community is informal language because we are all friends just joking with each other and having fun.
Throughout all of the research on this community the one thing I learned that I never noticed until now is how much all of my friends in this community love the sport of basketball. An example of this would be when a crazy NBA trade happens, we all go rush to message each other and start talking about if we think it was a good trade or not and if they fit their new team that they are on. Also when one of their favorite players has a bad game our competitive nature kicks in and we all make fun of them for it. Also when we go to the park to play and we have a bad game we all talk about what we could have done better to win, and when we do good and have a good game we all start bragging about the things that we did and how cool we were. All of these things are what made me rethink the way that I looked at the group and they showed me how much fun me and my friends have by just talking and connecting over the sport we all love called basketball.
Work Cited
Rodriguez, Xavier. Personal Interview. Febuary 2020
Zamir, Sheryar. Personal Interview. Febuary, 2020
