Well you know, sometimes we feel we are being profound, but what we say may seem obvious to others.
This is the problem with writing; we can end up spending hours and hours and wind up saying the blimen obvious. But this piece of writing here was, I suspect, a quickly written thing and a response given quickly back.
A post and a comment, in fact.
But bounded to a specific geographical place – the enticingly named ‘Grinder's Hill’ in Sheffield.
In my travels on the Net, looking to help a student, I came across
this fantastic article by Kevin Leander. He writes of markings on walls like this:
Unbounding Internet culture and identity
While walking through the city, you might come upon chalk marks on the outside of a building that look something like a large version of this: )(, with letters and numbers written adjacent to them. These symbols are giving you information about how to tap into a wireless local area network (WLAN) based inside that building; someone has “warchalked” the building so that you may open up your laptop or personal digital assistant (PDA) and piggyback on a high-speed network supported by a business or building resident. This literacy practice is said to have its historical precedent in the marking of buildings by beggars and the homeless during the Great Depression in the United States, who used chalk marks on the outside of buildings to indicate whether or not they were good places for handouts.
I am so fascinated by this idea of the urban sketch pad. It is a kind of Janus thing with a face to the past and a face to the future. Graffiti is usually etched in liminal spaces anyway – as in the example above – a snicket between two buildings you would hardly know was there – but Leander’s example is so potent. A primal text, an etching temporarily chalked on the wall, acting as a portal to the new literacy world enabled by technology. The pervasive thing that invisibly permeates our airwaves.
It is interesting also to wonder about the nature of the blog post. It seems so new but like the comment I photographed on the wall above, it can be commented upon by passer’s by and that comment can be anonymous or signed. It can undermine, confirm, add to something (etc.) But the chalked comment is bounded by a geographical space; potential interactants have to pass by. On the Internet it is maybe different; is the Internet tying the text to one space; or is it many spaces? Of course Foucault has written about this in
'Of Other spaces'. P.S.
Am adding a PS!! Is this allowed on a blogpost? I want to add something to the orginal thing ...
I would like to analyse street texting as compared to blogging in terms of certain aspects of their characteristics:
1. Both in spaces that are also used for other things - e.g a wall is to be part of a building.
2. Both can be specifically authored, anonymised or written under pseudonym.
3. Both are written for an unknown audience.
4. They can be transient or permanent - but depend on the host staying there. (I.e the server can cut the post or the whole blog; the wall can be knocked down or text cleaned off.)
5. Audience can respond - anonymous, with real name, or under a pseudonym.
6. There are specific conventions - e.g. emoticons or shorthand stuff. (As in the code Leander shows in the article above).
7. The text can agree, disagree or undermine.
8. There may be far more readers than commenters. There may be no readers at all.
9. Posts are often political; personal; funny; on any topic at all.
10. Someposters are really wellknown, some are not.
11. The test is somehow environmental and in liminal spaces.
