Journal #4

     The scene and place of writing are two essential factors that must be taken into consideration by the writer in order to make an appropriate piece of writing. The article speaks of the different intentions that graffiti writers may have when writing on public surfaces, most of the time it allows the writer to identify themselves or they are trying to reach out to a specific audience. Many of us can look at graffiti and only see one word such as “hate” and think of what criminal would vandalize property in such a way for one word, while the audience that was targeted may look at it as poetry or a form of expressing themselves during a period of economic and racial struggle.

     The result of one writer expressing themselves through graffiti may lead to a wave of other graffiti writers tagging the streets and creating a radical but efficient way for these writers to circulate ideas about certain issues or beliefs that each one may have. The audience may be very limited to just the writers themselves but the scene and place of the writing, for example a subway train, allows for a whole city to view their writing. This confirms the efficiency of tagging the graffiti writers prefer to use rather than writing a book on the issue or making posters. The thought process that they could be having is, “What will catch the eye of people walking the streets more? Spray paint? Or a small 8.5 by 11 piece of paper?” Like Sam Maloney stated in his journal, “The scene and place will have a substantial impact on the type of information circulating in a particular area, in order to appeal to the particular audience in that location.”