[Air-l] Online graffiti

[Deanya Lattimore]

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 at listserv.aoir.org 
wrote:
>
> Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:56:03 +1000
> From: Jean Burgess <je.burgess at 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