trans and queer lesbian just trying this thing out
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19 - gemini - US
english, toki pona
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i maintain @precious-tiny-things
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letterboxd | storygraph | backloggd
i consider something to be a discourse when it meets the following conditions:
It is imbued with moral weight, or one’s position on it is otherwise considered to be indicative of their membership in a broader faction.
It becomes widespread enough within a community that, combined with the implied mora weight, a sizeable portion of the community feel some compulsion to weigh-in.
that’s probably useless for coming up with a succinct way to convey the idea, but yk
debate? discussion? anything is a discourse if there's a non-zero amount of people willing to, well, discuss it. doesn't need to be super serious or sensitive (even though the ones that happened here are, but you get what i mean)
i guess it's just a nicer, less agressive way to say "hey, we're all talking about this single topic here and there's a lot of different opinions floating around"
I don’t know the history of the word in other spaces, but by my fuzzy recollection it got popular in the early 2010s as a replacement for ‘fanwank’ in LJ/Dth fan spaces, for use when the subject got serious vs the usual petty interpersonal beefs. Posts starting what we would call Discourse now were called meta, which I hadn’t seen used for years until the ‘cohost meta’ tag here!
Generally when I think of ‘discourse’ now I really am still thinking of it as what we used to call wank. Lots of people yelling over each other, an attempt to address some kind of situation (or even just theoretical concept) that falls into personal antagonism and escalating finger-pointing, a devolution into self-righteousness circlejerking on all sides, etc. I would love to think that there's a way for strangers to discuss serious topics online without this happening but rarely have I seen it happen and it has thoroughly colored my view of ‘online discourse’ ha.
