This profile of a persistent tagger generated over 100 comments. The first 100 break down into the following general response types:
- Serious punishment (imprisonment, deportation or direct violent retribution)
- Other punishment (cutting off benefit, etc.)
- Insulting the tagger with no other comment (waster, moron, loser, etc.)
- Looking for a positive way of working with him
Merging the “other punishment” category with the “insults” category (to represent negative affect without any specific demand for serious punishment) gives this distribution:
Wow. I hope that it really just shows that there is overwhelming proportion of people who are inclined that comment on stuff are that extreme. I really hope that it isn’t even remotely representative of the general populace. There are so many more important issues and horrific crimes to get upset about. I find it hard that that many people get _that_ enraged over tagging. I mean it doesn’t actually physically harm anyone.
Look, I don’t really want to weigh in on the tagging debate. Because I know my right wing views will clash horribly with the many left wingers who read this. And I don’t really want to argue with people.
My opinion. Vandalism is bad. Damaging other peoples property is bad. Most the readers on the stuff poll who felt the need to comment probably make the assumption that bad should equal punishment (rather than corective action). I’m not sure I agree – stick vs carrot. By all means, encourage taggers to use allocated “tag walls” to express themsleves. But for those who persist in willfully damaging property, there should be punishment.
While tagging might be considered art, 99% of it is art that I don’t find attractive. And I’m not sure a desire to create art is the driving force behind most taggers – I think perhaps the adrenaline buzz of doing something they know is wrong and will get them in trouble might be. But that’s broad generalisation.
Anyway, that’s my 2c worth. Apologies if it’s a bit rambly.
And by the way…
I don’t find this article nearly as annoying as the one recently about an idiot Dad who kept getting in trouble for going out fishing without the right gear. THAT article I couldn’t understand – “Let’s give publicity to this moron who is trying to win the Darwin award”. Lets not reward bad behaviour with publicity.
This article (on tagging) was informative, I thought it gave a good insight into the mind and reasoning behind the tagger. The other article was just information on the moron (and a photo of him and his daughter).
I’ll try and find the link.
For what it’s worth, I’m totally on board with some kind of punishment as a reasonable response to property vandalism by marker-pen. I think it’s only one part of the appropriate societal response, but it’s in there, sure.
What freaks me out about the graph is that 40% of discussion advocates imprisonment, deportation or direct physical violence.
Yeah, there were some extremes there.
What I think it is is that New Zealanders (as a broad generalised group) are seeing their idyllic country turning to shit. Crime seems to be high, we read about murders every week, and grafitti seems tobe everywhere (I tend to block it out now, although I see heaps on the train every day). And they want to do something about that, and it often seems to swing to extreme action.
What’s concerning is how that will affect policies in the upcoming election. I’m thinking of the sort of extreme parties we saw in Australia in the last decade (Pauline Hanson’s One Nation). If Winston Peters decides it’s an area where he can win some votes (and get NZF over the 5% threshold), he may come out with some extreme policy. I don’t know.
And in regards to my last point, the article about the idiot dad can be found here:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4552734a6479.html
Maybe the intent was to name and shame him, but I just thought it was giving him publicity for being a dick.
Maybe part of the rage involved is because tagging is such a hard thing to police – a property owner could sit outside their building six nights of the week guarding it, but the tagger only needs 5 minutes of access on the 7th night to mess up the property and still get away clean.
I can remember reading (a long time ago) parts of a book called Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, that posited among other things that the really savage punishments that the Middle Ages took for granted were partly because the odds of catching any given criminal were quite low, so a nasty punishment was needed as a deterrant. As observation techniques gets better, the odds of being caught are higher and the punishments not as gruesome, because the higher chance of capture is supposed to act as a deterrant. Taggers know that they’re hard to catch, so maybe the horrible punishments being posited by property owners, and, scarily, the support for horrible things that have been done to taggers is a subconscious reaction to this.
(Wikipedia entry for the book doesn’t exactly discuss this point, so it’s possible my memory is playing me false.)
Stephanie just dropped the F-bomb!
SOUND EFFECT: SLIDE WHISTLE, FOLLOWED BY “SPOI-OI-OING!”
Jon: I don’t think you’ll offend people by saying that vandalism and defacing property is something that you think is wrong and should be perceived as such. 🙂
I think the main problem people have with this articles is the number of comments to it proposing quite extreme punishments for what, as far as crimes go, isn’t that bad.
cut their hands off!!!!!
Why stop with their hands… off with their heads!!!
“Stephanie just dropped the F-bomb!”
You’re unpleasant.
Steph: It is best to interpret dear Joey as a desperate, sweating clown whose smile makeup is starting to run.
I’ve been thinking about your comment since you posted it, about a tradeoff between change of capture and severity of deterrent. It sounds plausible, at least, although I’d want to read the full version before throwing any weight behind it. I suspect there’s a lot more mileage in a power-relations explanation of the violent discursive response, something else about which Foucault would have had plenty to say I’m sure.
People around here are too uptight. I guess I should have used quote marks, said “THIS IS A JOKE”, and put a link to the cartoon about stuffed animals I was referencing:
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=10262005
Joey: You have to say LOL.
LOL!
I check the stuff poles regularly, and I’m quite convinced that they’re representative of typcial ACT if not National voters. Take for example the release of the latest budget. Given the current economic climate, the budget is basically nuts. It might have made sense a year or two ago when NZ was running a massive surplus, but the surplus has all but disappeared, and pumping more money into the economy along with the increased in dairy prices and fuel prices puts extreme pressure on inflation. And this was quite clearly explained on Stuff. However, when you went to the poll that asked whether people thought that the budget in terms of tax breaks was too much, about right or not enough, the not enoughs were around 90% if I recall. Assuming that conservatives right wingers (yep realising that this is an assumption) are the ones pushing for tax cuts, then I’d say that a large number of stuff pollsters are pretty right wing.
As for tagging, well, from where I’m sitting I find it very hard to have any sympathy for them. Taggers are essentially vandals, and I have to pay to have the train windows replaced and the walls cleaned in both the train stations and the trains themselves and fail really to see any relevance in the argument that it is attractive or not. No issue with having a designed bus stop or underground at all. Trying hard to be sympathetic for a deliberate action of vandalism.
I think you need another category for the ones that just think he’s cool.
Yeah where do those folks who said “Actually I think graffiti makes bridges and trains look better” fit?
I pretty much bundled them into “work with him”. Anyone who wants to check my math (and my category definitions) should feel free, it only takes about ten minutes…