Culture jamming employs techniques originally associated with Letterist International, and later Situationist International known as détournement. It uses the language and rhetoric of mainstream culture to subversively critique the social institutions that produce that culture. Tactics include editing company logos to critique the respective companies, products, or concepts they represent, or wearing fashion statements that criticize the current fashion trends by deliberately clashing with them.[5] Culture jamming often entails using mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, commonly using the original medium's communication method. Culture jamming is also a form of subvertising.[6][7]
Culture jamming is intended to expose questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture, and can be considered a reaction against politically imposed social conformity. Prominent examples of culture jamming include the adulteration of billboard advertising by the Billboard Liberation Front and contemporary artists such as Ron English. Culture jamming may involve street parties and protests. While culture jamming usually focuses on subverting or critiquing political and advertising messages, some proponents focus on a different form which brings together artists, designers, scholars, and activists[8] to create works that transcend the status quo rather than merely criticize it.[9][10]
Origins of the term, etymology, and history
The term was coined by Mark 3000 of The Upstairs Burned and Mark 3000 in The Fascist States in a Flint, Michigan fanzine, Death and Gravey, in 1981.[citation needed] Subsequently, it was attributed to having been created in 1984 by Don Joyce[11] of American sound collage band Negativland, with the release of their album JamCon '84.[12][13][14] The phrase "culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming,[13] where public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies used by governments. In one of the tracks of the album, Joyce stated:[13]
As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard... directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.
According to Vince Carducci, although the term was coined by Negativland, the practice of culture jamming can be traced as far back as the 1950s.[15] One particularly influential group that was active in Europe was the Situationist International and was led by Guy Debord. The SI asserted that in the past, humans dealt with life and the consumer market directly. They argued that this spontaneous way of life was slowly deteriorating as a direct result of the new "modern" way of life. Situationists saw everything from television to radio as a threat[16] and argued that life in industrialized areas, driven by capitalist forces, had become monotonous, sterile, gloomy, linear, and productivity-driven. In particular, the SI argued humans had become passive recipients of thespectacle, a simulated reality that generates the desire to consume, and positions humans as obedient consumerist cogs within the efficient and exploitative productivity loop of capitalism.[10][17] Through playful activity, individuals could create situations, the opposite of spectacles. For the SI, these situations took the form of the dérive, or the active drift of the body through space in ways that broke routine and overcame boundaries, creating situations by exiting habit and entering new interactive possibilities.[10]
Mark Dery's New York Times article on culture jamming, "The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax"[13] was the first mention, in the mainstream media, of the phenomenon; Dery later expanded on this article in his 1993 Open Magazine pamphlet, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,[19] a seminal essay that remains the most exhaustive historical, sociopolitical, and philosophical theorization of culture jamming to date. Adbusters, a Canadian publication espousing an environmentalist critique of consumerism and advertising, began promoting aspects of culture jamming after Dery introduced founder and editor Kalle Lasn to the term through a series of articles he wrote for the magazine. In her critique of consumerism, No Logo, the Canadian cultural commentator and political activist Naomi Klein examines culture jamming in a chapter that focuses on the work of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada. Through an analysis of the Where the Hell is Matt viral videos, researchers Milstein and Pulos analyze how the power of the culture jam to disrupt the status quo is currently being threatened by increasing commercial incorporation.[10] For example, T-Mobile utilized the Liverpool street underground station to host a flashmob to sell their mobile services.
Culture jamming is a form of disruption that plays on the emotions of viewers and bystanders. Jammers want to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement.[16] Activists that utilize this tactic are counting on their meme to pull on the emotional strings of people and evoke some type of reaction. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change.[20] Culture jamming also intersects with forms of legal transgression. Semiotic disobedience, for example, involves both authorial and proprietary disobedience,[21] while techniques such as coercive disobedience comprise acts of culture jamming combined with a demonstration of the retaliatory actions (legal consequences) handed down by the ruling apparatus.[22]
The basic unit in which a message is transmitted in culture jamming is the meme. Memes are condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others. The term meme was coined and first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins, but later used by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff, who claimed memes were a type of media virus.[23] Memes are seen as genes that can jump from outlet to outlet and replicate themselves or mutate upon transmission, just like a virus.[24]
Culture jammers will often use common symbols such as the McDonald's golden arches or Nike swoosh to engage people and force them to think about their eating habits or fashion sense.[25] In one example, jammer Jonah Peretti used the Nike symbol to stir debate on sweatshop child labor and consumer freedom. Peretti made public exchanges between himself and Nike over a disagreement. Peretti had requested custom Nikes with the word "sweatshop" placed in the Nike symbol. Nike refused. Once this story was made public, it spread worldwide and contributed to the already robust conversation[26] about Nike's use of sweatshops,[25] which had been ongoing for a decade prior to Peretti's 2001 stunt.
Jammers can also organize and participate in mass campaigns. Examples of cultural jamming like Perretti's are more along the lines of tactics that radical consumer social movements would use. These movements push people to question the taken-for-granted assumption that consuming is natural and good and aim to disrupt the naturalization of consumer culture; they also seek to create systems of production and consumption that are more humane and less dominated by global corporate late capitalism.[27]
Past mass events and ideas have included Buy Nothing Day, virtual sit-ins and protests over the Internet, producing ‘subvertisements' and placing them in public spaces, and creating and enacting ‘place jamming' projects where public spaces are reclaimed and nature is re-introduced into urban places.[28]
The most effective form of jamming is to use an already widely recognizable meme to transmit the message. Once viewers are forced to take a second look at the mimicked popular meme they are forced out of their comfort zone. Viewers are presented with another way to view the meme and are forced to think about the implications presented by the jammer.[16] More often than not, when this is used as a tactic the jammer is going for shock value. For example, to make consumers aware of the negative body image that big-name fashion brands are frequently accused of causing, a subvertisement of Calvin Klein's 'Obsession' was created and played worldwide. It depicted a young woman with an eating disorder throwing up into a toilet.[29]
Another way that social consumer movements hope to utilize culture jamming effectively is by employing a metameme. A metameme is a two-level message that punctures a specific commercial image but does so in a way that challenges some larger aspect of the political culture of corporate domination.[25] An example would be the "true cost" campaign set in motion by Adbusters. "True cost" forced consumers to compare the human labor cost and conditions and environmental drawbacks of products to the sales costs. Another example would be the "Truth" campaigns that exposed the deception tobacco companies used to sell their products.
Following critical scholars like Paulo Freire, Culture jams are also being integrated into the university classroom "setting in which students and teachers gain the opportunity not only to learn methods of informed public critique but also to collaboratively use participatory communication techniques to actively create new locations of meaning."[10] For example, students disrupt public space to bring attention to community concerns or utilize subvertisements to engage with media literacy projects.
Some scholars and activists, such as Amory Starr and Joseph D. Rumbo, have argued that culture jamming is futile because it is easily co-opted and commodified by the market, which tends to "defuse" its potential for consumer resistance.[30][31] A newer understanding of the term has been called for that would encourage artists, scholars and activists to come together and create innovative, flexible, and practical mobile art pieces that communicate intellectual and political concepts and new strategies and actions.[9]
↑ Summers-Effler, Erika (2002). "The Micro Potential for Social Change: Emotion, Consciousness, and Social Movement Formation". Sociological Theory. 20 (1): 41–60. doi:10.1111/1467-9558.00150. S2CID16783024.
↑ Katyal, Sonia (2006). "Semiotic Disobedience". Washington University Law Review. 84 (3): 489–571. SSRN1015500. Fordham Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1015500, 20 September 2007.
↑ Rushkoff, Douglas (1996). Media Virus!. New York: Ballantine.
↑ Dawkins, Richard (1989). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1 2 3 "Culture Jamming". washington.edu. Seattle: Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, University of Washington. Retrieved November 20, 2009.
↑ Harold, Christine (2004). "Pranking Rhetoric: 'Culture jamming' as Media Activism". Critical Studies in Media Communication. 21 (3): 189–211. doi:10.1080/0739318042000212693. S2CID55119764.
↑ Bordwell, Marilyn (2002). "Jamming Culture: Adbusters' Hip Media Campaign against Consumerism". In Princen, Thomas; Maniates, Michael; Conca, Ken (eds.). Confronting Consumption. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
↑ Rumbo, Joseph D. (2002) "Consumer Resistance in a World of Advertising Clutter: The Case of Adbusters", Psychology & Marketing 19(2): 127–48.
General and cited references
Branwyn, Gareth (1996). Jamming the Media: A Citizen's Guide—Reclaiming the Tools of Communication. California: Chronicle Books ISBN9780811817950
Dery, Mark (1993). Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. Open Magazine Pamphlet Series: NJ. "Shovelware". Markdery.com. Archived from the original on 2009-04-22. Retrieved 2009-07-23. ASINB0006P19L8
Lasn, Kalle (1999) Culture Jam. New York: Eagle Brook. ISBN978-0688178055
LeVine, Mark (2005) Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil. Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications. ISBN978-1851683659
LeVine, Mark (2017) "Putting the 'Jamming' into Culture Jamming: Theory, Praxis and Cultural Production During the Arab Spring," in DeLaure, Marilyn; Fink, Moritz; eds. (2017). Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance. New York University Press. ISBN978-1-4798-0620-1
Perini, Julie (2010). "Art as Intervention: A Guide to Today's Radical Art Practices". In Team Colors Collective (ed.). Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States. AK Press. ISBN9781849350167.
Tietchen, T. Language out of Language: Excavating the Roots of Culture Jamming and Postmodern Activism from William S. Burroughs' Nova Trilogy Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. 23, Part 3 (2001): 107–130. ISSN1536-1810
Chaudhary, Shikher (2 August 2010). "Culture Jamming". helterskelter.in.
Milstein, Tema & Pulos, Alexis (2015). "Culture Jam Pedagogy and Practice: Relocating Culture by Staying on One's Toes". Communication, Culture & Critique8 (3): 393–413.
DeLaure, Marilyn; Fink, Moritz; eds. (2017). Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance. New York University Press. ISBN978-1-4798-0620-1.
The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.
Guerrilla communication and communication guerrilla refer to an attempt to provoke subversive effects through interventions in the process of communication. It can be distinguished from other classes of political action because it is not based on the critique of the dominant discourses but in the interpretation of the signs in a different way. Its main goal is to make a critical non-questioning of the existing, for reasons ranging from political activism to marketing. In terms of marketing, journalist Warren Berger explains unconventional guerrilla-style advertising as "something that lurks all around, hits us where we live, and invariably takes us by surprise". These premises apply to the entire spectrum of guerrilla communication because each tactic intends to disrupt cognitive schemas and thought processing.
Internet activism, hacktivism, or hactivism, is the use of computer-based techniques such as hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.
A détournement, meaning "rerouting, hijacking" in French, is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and later adapted by the Situationist International (SI), that was defined in the SI's inaugural 1958 journal as "[t]he integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres."
Subvertising is the practice of making spoofs or parodies of corporate and political advertisements. The cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term in 1991. Subvertisements are anti-ads that deflect advertising's attempts to turn the people's attention in a given direction. According to author Naomi Klein, subvertising offers a way of speaking back to advertising, ‘forcing a dialogue where before there was only a declaration.’ They may take the form of a new image or an alteration to an existing image or icon, often in a satirical manner.
The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."
Electronic civil disobedience can refer to any type of civil disobedience in which the participants use information technology to carry out their actions. Electronic civil disobedience often involves computers and the Internet and may also be known as hacktivism. The term "electronic civil disobedience" was coined in the critical writings of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a collective of tactical media artists and practitioners, in their seminal 1996 text, Electronic Civil Disobedience: And Other Unpopular Ideas. Electronic civil disobedience seeks to continue the practices of nonviolent-yet-disruptive protest originally pioneered by American poet Henry David Thoreau, who in 1848 published Civil Disobedience.
The First Things First 2000 manifesto, launched by Adbusters magazine in 1999, was an updated version of the earlier First Things First manifesto written and published in 1964 by Ken Garland, a British designer.
Alternative media are media sources that differ from established or dominant types of media in terms of their content, production, or distribution. Sometimes the term independent media is used as a synonym, indicating independence from large media corporations, but generally independent media is used to describe a different meaning around freedom of the press and independence from government control. Alternative media does not refer to a specific format and may be inclusive of print, audio, film/video, online/digital and street art, among others. Some examples include the counter-culture zines of the 1960s, ethnic and indigenous media such as the First People's television network in Canada, and more recently online open publishing journalism sites such as Indymedia.
Kalle Lasn is an Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor, and activist. Near the end of World War II, his family fled Estonia and Lasn spent some time in a German refugee camp. At age seven he was resettled in Australia with his family, where he grew up and remained until the late 1960s, attending school in Canberra. In the late 1960s, he founded a market research company in Tokyo, and in 1970, moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Over the course of twenty years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board. He currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
A meme hack is changing a meme to express a point of view not intended or inherent in the original image, or even opposite to the original. The meme can be thoughts, concepts, ideas, theories, opinions, beliefs, practices, habits, songs, or icons. Distortions of corporate logos are also referred to as subvertising. Another definition is: "Intentionally altering a concept or phrase, or using it in a different context, so as to subvert the meaning."
Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology. It has been defined as "intentionally and meaningfully excluding or cutting goods from one's consumption routine or reusing once-acquired goods with the goal of avoiding consumption". The ideology is opposed to consumerism, being a social and economic order in which the aspirations of many individuals include the acquisition of goods and services beyond those necessary for survival or traditional displays of status.
Mark Dery is an American writer, lecturer and cultural critic. An early observer and critic of online culture, he helped to popularize the term "culture jamming" and is generally credited with having coined the term "Afrofuturism" in his essay "Black to the Future" in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. He writes about media and visual culture, especially fringe elements of culture for a wide variety of publications, from Rolling Stone to BoingBoing.
The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In the general sense, the spectacle refers to "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign." It also exists in a more limited sense, where spectacle means the mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation."
Jonah H. Peretti is an American internet entrepreneur. He is a co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, a co-founder of The Huffington Post, and a developer of reblogging under the project "Reblog".
Situationist prank is a term used in the mass media to label a distinctive tactic by the Situationist International, consisting of setting up a subversive political prank, hoax or stunt; In the terminology of the Situationist International, stunts and media pranks are very similar to situations. The détournement technique, that is "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself," was the essential element of a situationist prank. The Situationist tactic of using détournement for subversive pranks is such a distinctive and influential aspect of the Situationist International, that they are sometimes labeled as a group of political pranksters.
Nike, Inc. has been accused of using sweatshops and worker abuse to produce footwear and apparel in East Asia. After rising prices and the increasing cost of labor in Korean and Taiwanese factories, Nike began contracting in countries elsewhere in Asia, which includes parts of India, Pakistan, and Indonesia. It sub-contracted factories without reviewing the conditions, based on the lowest bid. Nike's usage of sweatshops originates to the 1970's. However, it wasn't until 1991, when a report by Jeff Ballinger was published detailing their insufficient payment of workers and the poor conditions in their Indonesian factories, that these sweatshops came under the media and human rights scrutiny that continues to today.
Radical media are communication outlets that disperse action-oriented political agendas utilizing existing communication infrastructures and its supportive users. These types of media are differentiated from conventional mass communications through its progressive content, reformist culture, and democratic process of production and distribution. Advocates support its alternative and oppositional view of mass media, arguing that conventional outlets are politically biased through their production and distribution. However, there are some critics that exist in terms of validating the authenticity of the content, its political ideology, long-term perishability, and the social actions led by the media.
Brandalism is an activist artist collective founded in 2012 in the United Kingdom which engages in subvertising, culture jamming, and protest art. Brandalism uses subvertising to alter and critique corporate advertising by creating parodies or spoofs to replace ads in public areas. The art is typically intended to draw attention to political and social issues such as consumerism and the environment. Advertisements produced by the Brandalism movement are silk screen printed artworks, and may take the form of a new image, or a satirical alteration to an existing image, icon or logo. The advertisements are often pasted over billboards, or propped under the glass of roadside advertising spaces.
Billboard hacking or billboard hijacking is the practice of altering a billboard without the consent of the owner. It may involve physically pasting new media over the existing image, or hacking into the system used to control electronic billboard displays. The aim is to replace the programmed video with a different video or image. The replaced media may be displayed for various reasons, including culture jamming, shock value, promotion, activism, political propaganda, or simply to amuse viewers.
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