For the three articles this week, I was able to inquire more in depth of how our identity is heavily constructed from our social media profiles. What we ‘like’, post, record and follow all relates into other’s perception of our daily life and experiences. Broad generalizations and assumptions are easily formed of what is posted at this location, and this time on this date. The authors and people mentioned in these articles are using their work to create a community through text, or written articles published online. This community gives people the ability to reach out to numerous people all throughout the world and relate to them in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. “It was also important for me to direct the poem about race and culture in a way that asked the participants to dig deep. It is so easy for us to approach difficult conversations in easy, familiar ways.”

         Harris believes that to be in a ‘discourse community’ people must share and communicate through the same language. This could be any instance when a group of people can relate to one another when not necessarily just another passing person could immediately understand. As a personal example, within my community of friends, we have ‘inside jokes’ and nicknames that we rattle off at different times to one another that no one but us would understand. This creates my own personal discourse community within my friends. It is our own language that we communicate and share between one another.

         Online I am apart of a few different communities. I have more social account for fun such as my Instagram and twitter where I can easily share and converse with my friends. These are leisure sites where I can surf the content in my free time. The people on these sites who I follow and who follow me back are their own communities. Apart from my personal accounts, I have more serious ones as well. I have a online profile for a national site regarding my sorority. Through this site I am able to stay up to date with monthly dues, news, and events. This is a separate community that I am apart of with my ‘sorority sisters’. The language I speak and share on this profile is different than what you would find in my most recent tweet. I am apart of this writer’s blog community as well. What I choose to share with my classmates is a different language than I would share with anyone else. This is another community and to be apart of it, the other students can relate and tune into what I am sharing.

         One interesting thing I gained from the articles was from the ‘Fakebooking: Why I didn’t Post this Picture’. I found myself questioning the honesty of online updates. If Erin Ruddy had posted the picture of her children with the snowman, all the most difficult part of the afternoon (the meltdowns, screaming and fighting) all would have never been highlighted. The cute picture snapped in that one second masked all the other obstacles she had to tackle as a mother. She then realized that by posting that picture, all other mothers would have just looked at her with the envy of how easy that must’ve been for her when it was in fact the opposite. “And it would have felt wrong for people to see this photo pop up in their newsfeeds and think, aw how sweet and fun... I would have felt like a fraud since at the time the photo was snapped my blood pressure was through the roof and I had legitimately growled at the kids a few times”. This comes to show that not everything we see online is true and is as glamorous as it’s pictured to be.