I don't think I've missed anyone saying this, but apologies if I have. Recent posts have made me think of sites like WalmartSucks.com as online graffiti -- "graffiti" being generally thought of as something that the owner of the building would have removed if possible. But websites that use the brand names of others to complain about them have an added nuance of derogation, so I'm not sure how productive my thinking is here. :-D. On Sunday, April 23, 2006, at 03:02 PM, air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org wrote:
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:56:03 +1000 From: Jean Burgess <je.burgess@qut.edu.au> Subject: Re: [Air-l] Online graffiti
I think the case for the abuse of wikipedia working like graffiti only works if the metaphor is refined a bit - it's more like someone coming along to a community street mural and deliberately painting something out of step with the aesthetic and political values that have been implicitly or explicitly agreed on by the 'community' that is working on the mural. A bit different from walking up to the blank rendered wall of, say, a McDonald's and writing "ronald sucks" on it. In one case (the mural), the wall is constructed as open and 'writable' and in the second case (mcdonald's) it isn't, because of very clear binary distinctions between who owns the wall and therefore gets to paint it, and who doesn't. All of which makes wikipedia a far more interesting case, IMHO. cheers Jean
Jean Burgess http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~burgess Reviews editor, International Journal of Cultural Studies