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 called Death and Gravey
in 1981. Subsequently, it was mistakingly attributed to being 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, they 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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." 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.
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.
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