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Jordan Hayes
Professor Rytov
ENC 2135
September 14, 2015
Cracking the Code of the Kanye to The Community
Contemporary society has found itself at the mercy of many different digital
technologies. The birth of these digital technologies has led to the creation of several different
digital communities. Each of these digital communities utilize their own forms of discursive
genres in order to provide better methods of communication to their respective members. For
example, a digital community dedicated to artists sharing their work with one another may
include a rating system so that artists can get a generalized form of feedback from each other.
Throughout the course of this narrative, I will explain how the digital community Kanye To The
utilizes such discursive genres and how the community is served by digital technology.
Kanye To The began as messaging board devoted to Kanye West fans and Kanye West
discussion. In order to prevent the website from becoming stagnant and obsolete, it eventually
expanded to include more artists (such as Drake, Travi$ Scott, etc.) and other miscellaneous life
sections (such as Life & Advice, Fashion & Style, etc.). To summarize, the purpose of the
website is to act as a haven for fans of music, popular culture, and most importantly Kanye West.
Due to the many different areas of life that the website appeals to, the community is very diverse.
The average member is typically around 18-25 years old and they are all very active within the
community (the website typically has over 9,000 active members at a time). The communitys
wide range of appeal is one of the distinguishable features of Kanye To The.

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In order to gain insight on the discursive genres used by the Kanye To The community, I
interviewed Dante, a tenured member of the community. My first question for Dante was what
exactly brought him to the community. His response was that he used to lurk (observe
something as an outsider) the communitys threads (Dante explained that a thread is simply a
discussion board; one big chatroom essentially) because he found them to be funny; he continued
to lurk until he felt comfortable enough to make an account. When asked to elaborate on what
exactly was so funny, he claimed that it was mainly the lingo that the community had created.
For example, if someone were to make a news thread a week after the respective news had first
dropped, then it would be typical for a member of the community to reply and flippantly claim
that they were early on getting the news. After receiving this first example, I asked Dante if he
could provide me with any more examples of Kanye To The lingo. According to Dante, Kanye
To The has its own set of emojis or emoticons, each of them being reactionary images of the
faces of different celebrities, and when someone creates a quality thread that doesnt receive that
many replies, it would be typical for a user to say that the thread blew up.
After receiving information from Dante about the lingo used on Kanye To The, I decided
to formulate my own hypothesis on why it is used on the website. Thread blew up and early
both imply sarcasm. After going on the website and looking at some of the emojis for myself, I
found that, similarly, most of the emojis implied sarcasm. The nature of the lingo used by the
community leads me to believe that the community, while informative, doesnt intend to take
itself that seriously. The community intends to be a fun social networking website, using the
digital technology of online news to further communication between members. However, in
order to observe and either prove or falsify my claim I had to gain personal experience with
Kanye To The.

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After completing the first half of my interview with Dante, I chose to examine the threads
of Kanye To The in order to gain experience with the website for myself. After having my
signup approved by one of the websites administrators, I immediately went to the websites
Kanye West forum. Most of the threads that I came across on the Kanye West forum were
focused on news and current events. The thread I had chosen to observe was called Do you
think Kanye will say I knocked the edge off on Swish. The first thing I was looking for upon
entering the thread was examples of the lingo discussed by Dante; I found a lot of it. One user
simply replied to the thread with 0 and it was subsequently quoted by another member of the
community, so I can only assume that its symbolic for something. In order to gain an even more
personal perspective on the lingo used by the Kanye To The community (and because the thread I
was observing was randomly deleted during my observation), I decided to change threads. The
name of the new thread was New Kanye Verse? I observed the usage of the emojis Dante
listed and other Kanye To The lingo in this thread. It sounds fire, In, Domeski, 1st Page,
and Take your L, all examples of unfamiliar lingo that I found on the first two pages of the
thread alone. The way in which the lingo was used in the new thread corroborated my
hypothesis. They were all used in a flippant manner that implied sarcastic, non-serious, and
humorous undertones within the community. Most of these phrases and terms were also clearly
understood by other members of the community; I would hypothesize that they were a discursive
genre not only existing as a symbol for Kanye To The culture and themes, but as a rite of passage
for new members. Knowing the lingo of the community and being able to apply it properly to
your discourse rhetorically serves to create ethos; it shows that you are an involved member of
the community. New members of the community must learn the language of the website and
adapt to the Kanye To The culture. While this idea of a rite of passage within the Kanye To The

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community does restrict the communication skills and experience of users new to Kanye To The,
it also promotes culture within the community and encourages members to try and learn the
language of the website in order to feel more at home within Kanye To The.
In order to gain an even more personalized perspective on the concepts of thread making,
lingo, and the Kanye To The rite of passage, I decided to create my own thread in the TV &
Film forum entitled Prison School. The thread asked if anyone had seen the anime Prison
School and I threw in a bunch of Kanye To The lingo at the bottom of my post, so that, if I were
using them in the wrong context, Id be corrected and gain information on what these unfamiliar
terms actually meant. Instead of this happening, a user by the name of Lil Ugly Mane redirected
my thread to the general anime thread. When trying to think of another thread that I could make
I ran into difficulty; there were many all-encompassing anime or car or food threads on each
respective forum, making it very difficult to actually create a new thread on one of the forums
without being redirected. In this, I found a limitation of the thread making discursive genre.
Thread making was something that was only really possible in one of the artist or music threads
and only if you had found a new artist or had a pertinent current event to be discussed.
Despite my troubles with creating my own thread I didnt give up on trying to gain more
knowledge on them. I went back and looked at a screenshot I took of the Do you think Kanye
will say I knocked the edge off on Swish thread before it was deleted. I noticed that the thread
had a poll at the top of it. The polls question was Is Never See Me Again gonna be on
SWISH? (both the thread and poll contain terms related to Kanye West, such as SWISH, I
knocked the edge off, and Never See Me Again). The fact that this thread contained a poll and
that most of the threads were focused on news and current events leads me to believe that one of
the major purposes of threads and thread making is to give members the opportunity to discuss

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and share current events with other members and to gain and share opinions on these current
events. The polls are a lingo-adaptable type of digital technology that provide the community
with a unique source of communication.
Going back to the interview with Dante, I decided to try and gain a personal perspective
on another discursive genre that he provided me with, the PM or private message. However,
when I tried to PM a fellow member of the community, I was told by the website that I had not
yet accumulated enough posts to be able to PM other users (while this feature may ostensibly
seem to be non-salutary to effective communication, I believe it to tie into the rite of passage of
the community, which means it actually encourages new users to become full fledged members
of the website instead of the opposite). Unable to access the private messaging feature, I decided
to focus on Kanye To Thes Twitter community as my next and final discursive genre. I went to
the miscellaneous forum (one of the only forums where it is relatively easy to create threads) and
made a thread asking members of the community to follow me on Twitter, so I could become
involved in Kanye To Thes Twitter community. After a while, I got my first response, which
was simply Lol. In order to mitigate the issue of noncompliance I decided to just follow
Kanye To The on Twitter and go from there. The Kanye To The Twitter page contains tons of
information, current event articles, and links to popular threads on Kanye To The.
During the interview, Dante said that the purpose behind private messaging and the
Twitter community was to give members a means to personally communicate with one another,
after experiencing the community for myself, I believe him to be right. For example, if I were to
have a passionate argument or discussion with another user in a thread and I wanted to continue
further without disrupting the flow of the thread entirely, I would PM them and continue the
argument/discussion there. If I wanted to get an even more personal discussion going I could

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offer them my Twitter handle and we could continue it there. While they are both discursive
genres that focus on members engaging in more personal discourse, I believe that Twitter
specifically serves another purpose, it functions as a medium for digital technology. As
previously stated, the Twitter page for Kanye To The is filled with a bevy of news and current
events. I have claimed and substantiated that the purpose of Kanye To The is to be a social
networking site that mainly utilizes online news in order to promote communication and
discourse between members. While online news is in itself a digital technology, Twitter acts a
medium for such by providing access to it. Therefore, Twitter is not only a discursive genre for
personal conversation, but a medium for digital technology as well.
Digital technology serves Kanye To The in a variety of different ways. Online news is the
main digital technology used by the community. The community stands to be a social
networking website that utilizes online news in order to promote discourse between its members.
The discursive genres of lingo, threads, private messaging, and Twitter cannot exist in the
community without being derivative of online news. The online news shapes the entire
rhetorical discourse of the community: it creates ethos through being aware of news pertinent to
the community, logos through being able to effectively implement the current events to support
arguments, and pathos through the implementation of any sort of current event that draws on
emotion. Another digital technology used by the community is the poll. The poll allows
members of the community to gain communal opinions on the online news presented on Kanye
To The. Additionally, there are several other digital technologies that are utilized by Kanye To
The that I did not talk about in my narrative, such as websites YouTube, Spotify, and
SoundCloud. These websites provide members a way to access videos (YouTube) and music

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(Spotify and SoundCloud), both of which comprise a large percentage of the news content found
on Kanye To The.
The discursive genres that I focused on (lingo, threads, Twitter, and private messaging)
all serve to encourage discourse and communication between members of the Kanye To The
community. The lingo of the community tends to be very flippant and sarcastic and is not easily
understood by new members of the community. These facts support that the community itself is
not meant to be taken too seriously and that understanding the lingo over time is a sort of rite of
passage. The threads serve as mediums for news and current events and utilize digital
technology such as polls in order to allow members of the community to share and gain the
opinions of others concerning these news and current events. Finally, Twitter and private
messaging allow users to communicate with each other on more personal levels. The Kanye To
The community functions and can only exist through the existence of digital technology and
offers its members communication with discursive genres, such as website lingo, threads,
Twitter, and private messaging.

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