Fantasy Football as a Discourse Community
According to NFL.com, Fantasy football puts you and your friends in the front office and on the sidelines as you play as the General Manager and Coach of your own hand-picked team. You choose your team through a draft system from a list of the best players in the National Football League and they compete on a week by week basis for your team. You set your lineup each week during the season and watch as touchdowns, field goals, yards gained, interceptions, sacks, blocked field goals, and a lot more factors generate fantasy points for your team. A fantasy football league can’t function effectively without all of the different forms of communication. The quick access emailing, vigorous texting, calling, face-to-face video communication and the open message boards are
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Which is why we believe that fantasy football functions effectively as a discourse community. Scholar John Swales has done a lot of research and work to help others effectively understand the concepts of discourse communities. John Swales proposes six defining characteristics that are necessary and sufficient for identifying a group of individuals as a discourse community. Swales’ very first step says “a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals” (Swales 220) which are achieved in a variety of ways including the “mechanisms of intercommunications among its members” (Swales 221). “A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims” (Swales 221). With these given characteristics we believe that fantasy football functions as a discourse community among different men and woman. Although fantasy football is not an academic discourse community, it can certainly help add to the question if
American football is an intense sport in which two teams of 11 tough players endeavour to bringing the football to the opposite team’s end zone in order to succeed a touchdown or a field goal. The quarterback, who carries the ball, scrambles to avoid being sacked by the defense. Their aggressive behaviour on the football field causes them to act roughly at home, notably by using brute force against their wife or girlfriend. Louisa Thomas, the author of the essay “Together We Make Football”, published on September 17 in 2014, argue that domestic
I am a part of many different discourse communities. I am a college student, a millennial, a nanny, a family member, a friend, and a full time employee. In each aspect of my life, I participate in discourse communities with those around me; with goals, genre, and lexis. Of my discourse community memberships, the one which fit Swales’ definition most accurately would be in my place of work (HisWay).
A discourse community is a group of people that share a set of common goals and use communication to achieve these goals. My discourse community is the Bartlett High School Band. The band has a set of goals that we set up at the beginning of the year during leadership. I have been a part of this discourse community for three years. I was a part of a similar discourse community for one year, which was the Bolton High School Band. The Bartlett Band is a discourse community that has multiple methods of communication, a set of common goals, and a lexis.
This paper will explore how people within the National Football League (NFL) interact with each other to reach their goals as a team, and an organization as a whole. Sports teams are defined as two or more individuals who possess a common identity, have common goals and objectives, share a common fate, exhibit structured patterns of interaction and modes of communication, hold common perceptions about group structure, are personally and instrumentally interdependent, reciprocate interpersonal attraction and consider themselves to be a group (Group Dynamics, 2004). There are many people
In his article “The Concept of Discourse Community,” Professor John Swales defines what a discourse community is, following with a list of six different points that a group must align with in order to qualify as a discourse community. These parameters are as follows: “a broadly agreed set of common public goals,” “mechanisms of intercommunication among its members,” the use of “participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback”, use or possession of “one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims”, “some specific lexis”, and “a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise” (471-473).
Fantasy football is one discourse community that I participate in every year along with my friends and family. If a stranger were to listen to any conversations we were having about fantasy football, they may not understand some of the knowledge that is required of someone to contribute to the fantasy football domain. This is true because within a fantasy football league there are many different phrases and terminology that we would not use on a regular basis.
Things like Direct TV's Super Fan package will be beneficial to a fantasy football player who has three different games to watch, all being aired at the same time. Sportsline has a league that plays for money called "Gridiron Guru League." This particular league's players are made up of 14 celebrities from CBS announcers, Jim Nanta, Phil Simms, Boomer Esiason, Bonnie Bernstein, Dan Marino, Gus Johnson, Randy Cross, Brent Jones, Steve Tasker, Steve Cohen, Tommy Tighe, and Clark Judge (WWW.boston.com, 2006). This is now taking the form of celeberty fantasy football, the endless possablilities for the media to partake in this fantasy world. Sports Center is trying to lanch a new talk show specifically dealing with fantasy football updates, player stats, and so forth. Already ESPN Boston radio has a Wednesday night fantasy show with Mike Antonellis and Bob Halloran. "On the newstands, publications about fantasy outnumbered the traditional previews about the upcoming season" (Wendel, 2004, How Fantasy games, 11).
James T Porter describes a discourse community as a group who “Shares assumptions and what objects are appropriate for examination and discussion”, in other words; a group of people who are in some way or form connected. So, take engineers for example where every member pays the same price for entry, an engineering degree. This would mean that from day one every member is indoctrinated with the same way of thinking and share a common knowledge at the core of their education. The shared goals of the community are to design, develop and create new feats of engineering in their respective fields. In order for engineers to accomplish their goals, they need to work together and communicate. But, how exactly does an engineer communicate if they are
For the purposes of this paper, I will be using the criteria that were outlined by John Swales for what classifies as a Discourse Community. Swales said that for a community of individuals to be considered a Discourse Community if must meet six basic requirements. These requirements are that "there are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise" (Swales 224). We will explore these requirements further as we look into whether Reddit fits them or
A discourse community is a social collective that shares ideas, goals, values, and themes. Discourse communities existed in all facets of life, and are important to each individual’s social life. We all belong to varies discourse communities. The people you hang out with, the social networks you belong to, and even your favorite sports teams are discourse communities. Today we will look at a specific one; we will look at the discourse community of Mixed Martial Arts.
Communities may be a home away from home for some members with their own terminology and varying degrees of formality. These groups are usually joined by people for different reasons, some ranging from socializing to the acquisition of a single dream the group shares. Some groups even have members who are either expert in their communities focus or are members who are eager and ready to learn. For some of these communities, this form of communication and other factors is what defines them as a discourse community. However, there are communities that share some trait of discourse communities yet they themselves are not. Due to these strict rules about what can and cannot be a discourse community can be hard to discern. Like, for instance, the
Since the dawn of time that humans have reigned around the world, they have formed groups or communities that share common goals or interest. John Swales (1990), a respectable professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, developed a list of characteristics to determine communities or, as he calls it, a discourse community. He identifies these characteristics as all the discourse communities has agreed upon common goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, provide information and feedback, possess one or more genres of communication, distinguish vocabulary or lexis, and requirement for memberships (Swales, 1990, p. 1-5). The International Game Developers Association (IGDA), falls into the category as a discourse community. Founded in 1994, IGDA is a non-profit professional association that collaborates with projects that encompasses members from all fields of game development. They bring together developers to improve their lives and prepare the next generation of developers. The IGDA is a professional discourse community that defines all of Swales characteristic to be considered as a discourse community.
A discourse community comprises of a group of people sharing a common and distinct mode of communication or discourse, especially within a particular domain of intellectual or social activity (Oxforddictionaries, 2017). Some of the discourse communities I consider to be a part of, include an Indian joint family, my peer group, high school education in India, the Apple community and education at Pace university.
An example of a discourse community I choose to talk about in this paper is the JPS Nail Salon located near Elvis Presley Boulevard. I recently became a part of this particular discourse community group by volunteering to help out on the weekends. I thought it would be interesting to dig a little deeper as to how discourse community works out as a whole.
The game of football is being attacked. We see it every day in the headlines and on the news. The medical concerns are obvious. The game has taken more than its share of criticism. Even President Barack Obama said that if he had boys he wouldn’t let them play football. LeBron James publicly said no football in his house. So the question is asked all the time, Why would anyone want to play football? And why would anyone let their kids play? Here’s my answer. I believe there’s practically no other place where a boy is held to a higher standard then football. Football is hard, it’s tough, it demands discipline, it teaches obedience, it builds character. Football is a metaphor for life.