blog post 2

Social media can be a very versatile thing, it can be used as a to connect with people, it can be used to get your opinion out there, it can also be a tool for promoting something (i.e. businesses, charities, or your own work). For example Roxane Gay tweeted a picture of the acknowledgments page of her novel and it opened her novel up to new markets that would have been otherwise unavailable to her. She created a community for herself by opening herself up to new readers, essentially she created a community of fans and other people who appreciate her work on line. Also the woman behind #WhyIStayed created a community of people who had been in abusive relationships. I find this very touching that she got so many other people to speak up because domestic violence is not a crime that is reported in most instances, also it is not something the victims like to talk about; these people all stepped forward, told their story, and hoped it would help someone who was in the situation that they were in knowing people would look at them differently, talk to them differently, gossip, about them, and treat them differently.

I am on twitter I follow a lot of agriculture related twitter pages, a lot of unl and college based pages, and I also follow a few of my closer friends (most of them from college) on twitter. I find myself much choosier on who I associate myself with on twitter than I used to be when I had Facebook, because I didn’t need to be friends with every mother of my classmates’ and I don’t need to see baby/engagement pictures of people who I may have met twice, or other things that don’t really affect me but still blew up my news feed. (Sorry for that little rant…) Discourse shapes the communities because I have something in common with all the people in these communities whether it be that we share a passion, or we go to the same university, or we are close friends (and I’d like to think I have a fair amount in common with all of my close friends.) I usually enjoy sharing discourse with people who I have something in common with, but maybe that’s just because I really like to talk. I imagine that these communities became communities threw shared thoughts, feelings, or beliefs, also in other situations proximity to the other community members was a discerning factor in how these communities came about.