What Is A Discourse Community?

“Its gotta be the shoes!” (Mars Blackmon) There are many groups/discourse communities I belong to. A discourse community is a group of people who have a common interest. They also have their own way of speaking, writing, behaviors and values. My favorite one is the sneaker head community. What is a sneaker head? A sneaker head is a person who buys shoes to wear and collect. It has become a culture, and has made this sneaker loving community have its own way of speaking, writing, behaving, and showing what we value. We have certain slang in the sneaker head community. It’s been in the culture for so long that the words we use in this community is considered normal. For example, kicks, heat, and clean are some words we use. Kicks are our way
On a Facebook group such as SOS, which stands for sneaker head of Sacramento, we post up our shoes and sell/trade them. First a person must write the shoe’s name and the condition the kicks are in and rate it from one through ten. Furthermore, the person who is selling must also include his/her shoe size. Then, we write how much we want for them, by writing BIN for this amount of dollars or put S/O. BIN means to buy it now and S/O means the start off amount. For S/O it is like bidding on an item, the highest bidder wins. In addition, the seller must write if he/she is trading or just looking for cash, too clarify what he/she is looking for. If a person writes DS, and has proof that it is, then the price may go up. DS stands for dead stock. Dead stock is a shoe that has not been worn. Sometimes an individual likes a shoe so much he buys two pairs, and the extra pair is considered dead stock. Continuing on, a person must also show pictures of the shoe, so buyers know how the product looks like. A sneaker head who poorly writes in detail about his shoe, is more likely to be ignored. If I sold one pair of shoes, I would write Jordan 8 bugs bunny, size 9, condition is 9 out of 10, flaws are little creasing on the sides, BIN 140, just cash no trades, and then I would provide a picture. Properly writing about the shoes is what will help an individual sell his/her
We do not show off our shoes to say that we are better, but we show off the shoe because we believe the kicks on our feet are clean. When people turn and look at our shoes, we call that breaking necks. This means that people notice how clean our shoe is or how they pop out. Every sneaker head loves shoes and want others to see them wear it. It can differ for all sneaker heads, but most of them enjoy “breaking necks.” I personally just enjoy shoes in general, but from time to time I also would like to be “breaking necks.” For example, I remember in high school, I had my air Jordan 3 true blues shoes on. Everywhere in the hall way I saw kids looking at my kicks. That day I was breaking a lot of necks. We sneaker heads also like to flex our shoes. Flex means to show off our shoes to others sneaker heads. For example, on the day I was wearing my true blue 3’s, my friend was flexing his black cement 3’s. These black cement 3’s were composed of all black tumble leather with gray cement elephant prints. My shoe, the true blue 3’s is composed of white tumble leather with hits of red and blue. It was like a fun competition, just to see who has the more hyped up sneaker. It felt good showing off my pair of shoes and it is very fun flexing shoes to fellow sneaker heads. It is all for