Document Type
Article
Abstract
Conventional writing is accepted as being central to our communicative acts, to the expansion, dissemination, and documentation of ideas and meanings. Thus, by falling into the category of asemic, or non-semantic, mark making, the results of doodling are seen to effectively side step the conventions that are usually relied upon for the efficient conduct of ‘written’ communication. But this is not to leave them wanting in value. For while I agree that there is a time and a place for the kind of doodling that stands in contrast to productivity, to work—a time and a place to corrupt Parkinson’s Law wherein we find a doodle gradually ‘expanding to fill the time available for its completion.’ However, this perspective fails to acknowledge full the scope of doodling’s cultural value.
Interspersed with images of doodles, loops and pen tests, from my own ‘collection’, this discussion explores the semiotic and socio-anthropological contexts of doodling. This entails challenging a range of assumptions made about doodling that foster its questionable reputation (e.g. its supposed ‘aimlessness’ and what this supposition says, not about the activity of doodling itself, but about the broader cultural sphere in which doodling operates). By contextualising doodling in relation to the fundamental attribution error, egocentric speech, and the occult, this discussion posits doodling as creative cultural expression, rather than for indolence amid civilisation.
Repository Citation
Prescott-Steed, David. "Doodle Culture: Meditations on the Great Idle Scrawl." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 2, 2010, pp. 1–21. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss2/8