The Annotation Impulse: Graffiti and Social Media
Some of the bathrooms at MIT have chalkboards in them. It plays into the fantasy of being an MIT student: the head-in-the-clouds genius who will come up with the answer to a seemingly unsolvable theorem while standing over a urinal. He just must jot it down! But it also combats more permanent bathroom graffiti. Given a place to scribble something scandelous, knowing it can easily be erased, people who wouldn’t otherwise write things on walls might leave something behind for the next person to ponder.
In Oklahoma City, residents still mourn the 1991 passing of the “graffiti bridge.” Since 1930 it was where rival schools would make threats, students painted murals, and a whole lot of memories were made like the time on kid spilled a bucket of paint on a brand new BMW (The rubble is now repurposed as jewelry by a local artist.)
Some people think of books as holy things that should never been handled too roughly or written in, but I read everything with a highlighter between my thumb and index finger and a pen or pencil between my index and middle finger. Highlighting is a mnemonic device — I slow down and concentrate on the text when the fluorescent ink covers it. The pen is for writing my own commentary.
One of the best things about used books is the opportunity to pick a stranger’s brain. Not just the author — the previous reader. I’ve found so many odd, wonderful scribblings in previously owned books: first drafts of what eventually may be love letters and other funny or sad or interesting things. Sometime the annotation is enlightening. Sometimes it’s annoying. Whomever owned my copy of Understanding Media before me is an idiot and I cross out everything of his when I start a new page because it annoys and distracts me. But that’s part of the annotation impulse too.
Says Dovegreyreader:
Nothing sacred about my books, they are living and working extensions of my mind which as I get older is feeling slightly more full to overflowing, marginalia becometh a necessity not a sin.
Words that sum up the book as I’m reading, often a family tree if it feels complex, page numbers and gems of lines from the author, sometimes a message that the book will have hit me with suddenly and like a sledge-hammer, often a flash of blinding truth gone in an instant unless
I write it down.Don’t anyone suggest a notebook or post-it notes because those are never around when you need them whereas I have furnished the entire house with pencils.
After the publishing apocalypse, when we are all reading almost exclusively digital ink, we will share our scribbled pithy commentary, line by line, with whomever cares to read it (You can see a glimpse of this future on The Golden Notebook Project.)
Book marginalia is like graffiti without the property law infringement. The impulse is the same. It’s the same thing that drives kids to collect signatures on their cast when they break a bone, or later, get tattoos. And that is the same impulse that fuels the social web.
I know a lot of people who dream about painting their bedroom or office walls with chalkboard paint. Then there are those cafes where you can text something to appear on a screen on the wall. The bigger the cafe the more scandalous the messages get: “Dark haired girl in blue sweater cut me in line.” Before that there were places with paper walls and tables covered entirely with people’s scribbling. There are a bunch of them in Chicago. I was sad to see the emo verses I left on a wall in silver sharpie at a Gold Coast pizzeria as a teenager weren’t there ten years later. But that’s the nature of those things.
Karla Diaz in Journal of Aesthetics and Protest writes about those kind of places in an article about graffiti and texting: “public texting allows the once private text messages to be displayed on the sides of public buildings, on screens in coffee shops or on huge digital displays. People speak of this digital writing as an exciting possibility for language to exist in a visual, public space. However, one has to wonder how is this different from reading Graffiti on a wall somewhere?” So the big screen Twitter feeds at the tech conferences are kind of like graffiti.
“[Looking] at what I call the Older Graffiti artists’ original method of art practice which fosters collaboration and is guided by it street context, one can see how Graffiti culture has influenced text messaging,” Diaz continues, pointing out how younger, digital native graffiti artists think about their tagging as how it might look on a laptop or cellphone screen.
The major problem graffiti presented as an art form — its mortality — was overcome with the rise of blogs and digital curation. Looking beyond Diaz’ points about text messaging. How about Photoshop? What does seeing a website like LOLGraves make people think of architecture and space? Or what about the Internet as a hive mind? And then there is the joy you can get in doing something completely anonymous. The pleasure of a secret life. And don’t forget the way the Internet blurs the line between amateur and professional.
And on the Internet we can say whatever we want wherever we want. It completely open, for good and for bad. Some of us take that sense of entitlement with us to the street. People are writing “THE DOG DIES” on Marley and Me ads in Los Angeles. Just as they would to annoy others on a message board. Maybe it’s wrong, but what about last summer’s AT&T Billboard improvement in San Francisco?
My favorite blog post this year was Anti-advertising Agency’s call to “Demand a Read/Write City”
Our city is read-only. You’re free to read advertising, business signs, and city signs. But dare you write or hang anything of your own; you will be labeled as a criminal - a graffiti vandal. In many cities it’s even illegal to hang a sign for a garage sale on a light pole. If you happen to have a several thousand dollars, you might be able to say what you want - as long as it’s not too political.
But this is public space. You’re free to say whatever you want in public space, but freedom of speech does not extend to the visual environment. The visual environment is pay to play. Public visual space has become commercial space.
The visual environment is read only.
Why is read/write better? Because you can consume, process, and respond. This is how we think critically. This is how we learn. You can talk back. You can express yourself. You don’t just consume expression, you create expression.
Read/write is how democracy works.
There’s a reason kids want to write their names on walls. There’s a reason why people take graffiti seriously. Granted, graffiti writers don’t always know how to direct this energy, but I’d argue there’s some overlap with the reasons one writes their name on a wall and the reasons one runs for the school board. Being able to write means being able to affect your environment. To change it. You exist in the world not as a consumer, but an active citizen.
Read only culture creates apathy.
We need more places like the MIT bathrooms or the Oklahoma City graffiti bridge. In a better world, anywhere could be our chalkboard paint office.
Images: Geoffrey Raymond’s “Annotated Paintings” (some for sale on his website.)
Previously:
Graffiti in the Wilderness: Rock Climbing in a Granite Museum
Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection
Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
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