Discourse Wikipedia
People talk incessantly, and once there's writing, they live in and around the symbols that convey meaning and messages and information (and that goes back at least as far as the first cuneiform of Sumerian times. There are conversations within the speech community, which we can label as discourse. Sez Foucault<
...any practice by which individuals imbue reality with meaning ...a system of thought, knowledge or communication that constructs our world experience...Discourse analysis, in sociopolitical, social, and cultural context, attends to the state of play in intellectual exchange, which is the process of refining the information in a common ground (the set of propositions that the interlocutors have agreed to treat as true)