Search It Up! Building a community from scratch

 Hey folks, welcome back to another blog post for the week! Last week, we went over the importance of your participatory power, digital communities, and growing an audience within said communities. This week, we're going to go over how you can use and create content of your own through research, authorship, and rhetoric. For that, we're going to be using Chapter 4 from Rheingold's Net Space, Chapter 11, Pg.183 of Driscoll et al.'s Writing Spaces, and Dr.Tucker Steffen's Web Rhetoric, Authorship, and Digital Writing lecture.  

Have you ever spent time trying to learn something new? When you start a new hobby, it can be a daunting task to figure out exactly where to start, or what you can do to improve your skills. That's where finding a community that specializes in the hobby you're trying to learn comes into play. If you find a group of people steadily involved in making and divulging info on a particular subject, you can gain more knowledge about that subject, find a teacher, and become a prominent member of the group yourself(Driscoll, 2020)! A research community invents, distributes, and utilizes data in ways that are useful to that group(Driscoll, 2020).

So what are the benefits of joining a research community? When you participate in a research community, or any digital community for that matter, you have an opportunity to collaborate with others to create and share cultural media. According to Rheingold, "From cave paintings to Wikipedia the power of networked media stimulates new ways to share and act together." Nothing has ever been accomplished without a little help. When you collaborate with others, you're all collectively working towards a shared goal. Collaboration can lead to crowdsourcing projects such as Wikipedia, Reddit, and pretty much the majority of social media applications that you might encounter and engage in. 

As I mentioned last week, when you create your own community(Like blogs, podcasts, or even a Twitter account) you will need to appeal to the audience that is interested in your content. Aristotle explains rhetoric as "the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion."(Aristotle et al., 2020 as cited in Steffen, 2023). When you use rhetoric, you're appealing to your audience's Ethos(Your authenticity as the author), Pathos(The emotions invoked), and Logos(Facts and logic)(Aristotle et al., 2020 as cited in Steffen, 2023). Ultimately, using rhetoric to appeal to your audience helps build trust with them! Building trust with your audience can improve the way they interact with your content and interact with you. 

With Great Power...

Joining a community and growing your own are two big steps you can take to increase your presence in the digital world. However, as your influence grows, you should always be mindful of what you say on the internet! Some use their participatory power to spread positivity, while others do the opposite. As a diverse mixing pot of different cultures, it's important to have a degree of respect and understanding while navigating the internet, even to those who might be vastly different than you. As we come to the end of this week's post, think about the hobbies you have or want to do; where are some communities you might look for to find knowledge on that hobby? 

See you next week!

-MH

Works Cited:

Driscoll, D. (2020). Writing spaces: Readings on writing. Parlor Press.

Rheingold, H. (2012). Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.

Steffen, T. (2023). Web Rhetoric, Authorship, and Digital Writing lecture.  . Lecture.

Aristotle, Freese, J. H., Striker, G., Aristotle, & Aristotle. (2020). In Art of rhetoric. essay, Harvard University Press.