“Meeting of Styles” and the online infrastructures of graffiti

Abstract

Abstract Based on an analysis of a globalized graffiti-event called Meeting of Styles, in Berchem (Antwerp, Belgium), August 2015, this paper makes two elementary points. One, and in general sociological terms, understanding contemporary social and cultural processes is difficult when we do not take into account the complex dialectics between “offline” and “online” dimensions of these processes. Two, more specifically, this also applies to linguistic landscape analysis, where localist interpretations of signs in public space now need to take into account the intense connections between such “offline” signs and “online” infrastructures of knowledge, interaction and identity that attribute meaning, function and value to such signs. While both points appear self-evident, their implications for theory and analysis are profound and in need of exploration.