Read-Write Dog Culture
Since my mom’s big accident I’ve been taking care of her dog Tiki. We were out walking at Zapopan park here in New Taipei (Rosemead) today and I thought about what my cousin Mike calls dogs going for a walk and smelling stuff:
Reading the Newspaper
It’s a funny, but also a good description. After all, dog vision is poorer than human vision, but their sense of smell is something like 10,000 times better than ours!
The other day Didi’s owner Paige commented that boy dogs tend to pee everywhere and girl dogs don’t, and wasn’t it funny that Didi (a boy) doesn’t really pee all over, but Tiki (a girl) has to pee on everything. IDK if that gender observation is true or not, but it sure is true that on a walk Tiki has to leave a couple of drops everywhere.
People like Lawrence Lessig talk about “Read-Write Culture”. That The Internet has given us a voice that the top-down media of the 20th century didn’t offer. Yochai Benkler talks about “Social Production” and The Wealth of Networks.
As Tiki and I walked through Zapopan Park I realized that without an Internet, or at least without an Electronic Internet, dogs have always done this. Tiki “reads the newspaper,” and then she “adds to the story.” Call it a blog comment or a remix video or whatever you like, but I think dogs have always had Read-Write Culture. Without an Electronic Internet. But with a Geographic Internet. Or, with apologies, a Urinternet.
