dessalles

On most mornings a stack of amNY – one of two competitive free dailies – sits outside the entrance to my local subway stop. A few times a week I’ll grab one off the cheap wire rack for my ride to the office; yesterday’s edition came annotated…

It’s common commuter habit to pull newspapers from the untouched, unsoiled center of the stack, typically leaving a chafed & crusty top-copy for a gust of wind or a late-riser. This annotated edition, left on top, was passed up by a number of unimpressed commuters before I got my chance at it.

To what extent is the subversion of distribution infrastructure to disseminate “unofficial” communications an investment in that infrastructure, versus an attack on it’s intended function? In the same sense that we might interpret graffiti (or an any act of personalization for that matter) as a individual’s stake in a building/city/object’s survival, can we interpret these annotations as an acknowledgment of print media’s legitimacy even though the message directly challenges that media’s honesty? …an intertwining made more complicated by the author’s citations of stories contained within the paper in order substantiate his front-page editorial.

Which gets me thinking…
As news agencies continue co-opting social media to enhance their online outlets, how have they missed the mark by focusing too much on commentary and discussion as supposed enabling reinterpretation and remixing? Are people only interested in having discussions around a news story? Or would they rather introduce their worldviews and biases into a news story? It’s an understandable selfishness…news companies would rather package people into their product than let people re-package their product.

3rd party services like Reframe It offer browser plug-ins that enable the annotation of websites. But these are just surface annotations–just some spatially oriented blog-style comments. The primary work isn’t actually “reframed” because you’re not forced to read the comments first. The original material still frames the comments, not vice versa. In the case of my marked-up amNY, I coudn’t not read the writing first; it is disruptive. The article references/hyperlinks pulled those respective articles into a new context/story. And I was forced to acknowledge the paper’s previous reader before any of the articles’ authors, and it felt like I was genuinely sharing a newspaper with someone – it felt genuinely “social”.