"Sharing the love"

How a movement documents,organizes, and labels its creative outputs has powerful implications. It determines how the movement will be read for future generations. Expression of struggles are all to often looked at through a lens created not by the generators of that movement but those whose propagate and profit from its aesethics and ideas.

Can new technology tools help to combat or contribute to this commodification?

Many of the stencil designs we found on this blog came to via Flickr. Flickr is is an imaging hosting website. Users sign up for free and can store , arrange, label and most importantly share their photos with others. Users can tag photos with keywords that describe their content and search over those keywords.

On one hand , these new socially based networks, are decentralized and more democratic.
In this process of exchange new meanings and discourses are prescribed to an image. In other words, taking a photograph or video of yours or someone else cool stencil graffiti allows for a more global conversation.

The BBC notes that :

Users can create a list of friends who also use the site - instantly building online communities through picture sharing. Friends can write a comment beneath your photos or even attach a discreet note to part of the image itself, turning the whole experience into more of a conversation.

Flickr also has themed groups. It is easy to find and navigate within these groups for particular particular keywords . ( Our favorite groups is here....
If you notice , most of the photos are tagged by what they are or where they are located rather who may be by. ( Exception being Banksy, Shepherds Fairey and Swoon)
Enriched dialogue is one plus to imaging sharing sites like Flickr. Another is tagging. As one scholar writes:

This type of manual indexing is called tagging with index terms referred to as tags..... The basic principle is that end users do subject index-ing instead of experts only, and the assigned tags are being shown immediately on the Web. The details of tagging vary a lot but all applications are designed to be used as easy and as open as possible.

Thus, tagging puts the power back to the people who post or share. They decide how their image is going to read by saying what it can be searched under. Control the vocab is crucial.

But, what is lost? Or rather what can be more easily taken from a movement?

Influential German scholar Walter Benjamin would have a philosophical heyday deconstructing the issues of removing a artwork from its' original context. It is true that what surrounds, the graffiti is in some cases is just as important as the as the image itself.

By posting images online one grants access to many more viewers. What happens with this increased viewership is that it can inspire others. People can be inspiration to advertise what they wish; be it social justice or sneakers. Commercial advertisers are always on the look out for the hippest, edgiest design look and lingo. Now, they don't even have to leave their office to see what's happening on the streets.

In tole, then the new communication technologies are essence- just tools. A tool which could make it easier for mass media to borrow ideas, styles, etc for their campaigns for greater profit. Or, it can spur creation in the opposite direction - against this system. The impact of sharing and posting stencil graffiti online it can be argued is a little bit of both. This impact is still being felt and, of course, in these days documented simultaneously. One wonders if this tool will remain in the future for the master and the masses ?