The Morse Code of the 501’st

What do all people in a community have in common? Quite a few things actually, but what I have in mind is language. Language comes in all shapes and sizes and in all fonts and styles. Diction can be used in fiction as well as realistic nonfiction. In the case of the 501’st legion, you could say it's fiction because Star Wars is a fantasy universe, but at the same time, it could be nonfiction because these people bring it to life!

The Importance of Jargon

Jargons are the codes and abbreviations that people of a specific profession, or in this case a community use to communicate with other people in this community. For example, when a Police Officer says “10–4” that is a fancy way of them saying “Understood.” Well, in the same manner, people in the 501’st legion have special identifiers to identify themselves as well as words that a real-life military would use to describe what their squad is and situations that are similar.
The Identifiers and Jargon the 501’st Use

My community meets online through Facebook, and on Facebook, you obviously have your real name on there, but when you join the 501’st Legion I believe you are given an “Identifier” to be known as throughout the community. If you watched the latest Star Wars movies you would know that the character “Finn” was originally known as FN-2187 when he was a trooper in the First Order. In this community, you are given a similar name. For example, the main 501’st Facebook account posted an image (see image below) someone posted earlier that read “The droids you are looking for went that way” and then under that they gave credit to the member who posted that, “Member: DZ-90020 of Malta Beach Outpost.”

More Language Specific to the 501’st

As seen in the example above, the members of the community are not just known by their trooper name. In this case, “DZ-90020” but are also identified by their “squad” or as the more commonly used word in the community, “detachment.” What I mean by this is that they are known by their trooper name and what detachment they are from, in the above image, trooper DZ-90020 is from the “Malta Beach Outpost” detachment. Or in another picture showing us St. Patrick’s Day that trooper is in the “Outpost 42 Garrison”.

Connecting to “Because Internet

In chapter 4 of “Because Internet” by Gretchen McCulloch in the subheading of a “Kindler, Gentler Internet” she says that “As we’ve become better typists, we’ve also increased our ability to produce and appreciate the nuances of informal written language that allow us to be kind, humorous, or polite online.” The reason I bring that up is that I have noticed that the conversations and interactions between two or more people in a post or thread are one of those three things.

Maintaining Peace, Order, and Justice

This goes along with what I said in the last paragraph, people are polite, humorous, or kind online. By being a very accepting community and a very happy place to be, it does not close itself off to outsiders. In fact, they actually are very open to new people and want their community to grow continuously. Now that is what I call maintaining the order in an online community!

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