April 20

I liked these article best out of the ones we have read on discourse. The reason being is because John and Harris challenge the idea of discourse, and they give you both a negative and positive side of it.
“ …First, many people have chosen to be members of one discourse communities, groups with whom they share social, political, professional, recreational interest” (John) I like this quote because to me it seems as if he saying that people choose to be apart of a community based on their interest, and not because their family belonged to it. When we first started talking about communities I was led to believe that people chose them based on where their family belonged, I now see that the people apart of the communities have common interest.
There seem to me two warnings here. The first is that, since it has no “positive opposing” term, community can soon become empty and sentimental word.” (Harris) This really stood out to me because in pass articles they led me to believe that being apart of a community would be great and it would help me socially and academically. But Harris is leading me to be that it's not all that. It also makes me realize that just because people have similar interest, that's not enough to keep a community going.
I think we spent so much time on these articles, so we can form our own opinion about discourses,communities, ecologies. Just because someone wrote an article about them doesn't mean we have to agree with what they're saying. You need to learn to form your own opinion and in order to do that, you need pros and cons. That's why i enjoyed these two articles best.