Tag Archives: undersight

Churnalism, undersight

Also known as “nontent”: largely unedited chunks of press release copypasta’d into supposedly legitimate British journalism venues. This clever project can help you spot it in the wild. It’s depressingly common, especially in those organs which I increasingly find myself bracketing in a category labelled “the usual suspects”…

I like projects like this, because they let us watch the watchmen (and the watchmen who are supposed to be watching the watchmen). For the last few months I’ve been kicking around a concept called “undersight” for exactly this sort of citizen sousveillance phenomenon, and thinking it a pretty smart coining… until a swift Google revealed that someone at H+ Magazine beat me to it back in 2009, and that was probably where I first picked the term up before burying it in my subconscious. Ah, well. Still a useful term, though, and one I’ll be keeping.