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PoliticalGraffiti 4 - 07 Jun 2012 - Main.SamanthaLiTrenta
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| | I'm in Livorno, Italy taking a break in a coffee shop. Yes, it's amazing! I've seen political graffiti all over the place today and thought I'd pose a question for discussion: Why is there so much more political graffiti in Europe than in the United States?
I know we have some. But at least in my experience growing up in downtown Sacramento (where we have plenty of graffiti), rarely did I see political graffiti. Here, most of the graffiti includes political messages. | | | I'm not sure about the extent to which low minority turnout is unique to the US, but for what it's worth, Australia has a compulsory voting system that votes on weekends and has historically produced on average around 95 percent turnout for federal elections, although the numbers are significantly lower in the rural and indigenous-dominated Northern Territory (around 85 percent). Despite being compulsory, It's still possible to donkey vote or not vote at all (the penalty is a relatively nominal fine and you can be exempted for a range of reasons, including in my case an "all-day orchestra rehearsal"), so there is very little concern over governmental coercion even on the right. Quite the opposite, in fact - from my experience it's largely considered a civic responsibility akin to paying taxes and following speeding regulations. We also have an alternate vote system similar to what was recently proposed and rejected in the United Kingdom, which while not as directly representative as multi-member proportional systems, does provide more opportunity for third-party challenges without the Nader-esque problems of first-past-the-post (as seen with the significant upswing in Green votes in 2010).
-- RohanGrey - 25 May 2012 | |
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> | Italy was my first thought when I saw the title of this topic. I think that, in general, people in Italy are more informed about politics and especially international politics than people in America. Whether the information they're getting is accurate is a whole other issue. They still mainly get their news from television and the state controls three large channels and Berlusconi owns another three, meaning during his time in power he pretty much decided what people saw. He also exerted influence over media channels he didn't own. As more people in Italy took to the Internet to dissent (which happened surprisingly slowly), general frustration over only getting Berlusconi's versions of things grew. Furthermore, Berlusconi's version of government was a complete spectacle. It was all about appearances and beauty and putting on a good show, and the public very much internalized this. So it makes sense that objections or complaints or commentaries would be manifested visually, through graffiti, more so than in a place like the US where we mostly consume our news online and digest it and spit it back up, there, too. If anyone is interested in this stuff, I can provide more info about sources to check out once I'm back on my own computer, but in the meantime Google "Videocracy" and "Il Corpo delle Donne."
Kipp, your idea about the reason for the graffiti being in English is interesting, but I think you're overlooking another very simple reason: in Italy, English is "cool."
-- SamanthaLiTrenta - 7 June 2012 |
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