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. 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.
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 first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins but later used by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff that claimed memes were a type of media virus. Memes are seen as genes that can jump from outlet to outlet and replicate itself or mutate upon transmission just like a virus. Culture jammers will often use common memes to such as the McDonald's golden arches or Nike swoop to engage people and force them to think about their eating habits or fashion sense. In one example, jammer Jonah Perreti used the Nike symbol to stir debate on children sweatshop labor and consumer freedom. Perreti made public exchanges between him and Nike over a disagreement. Perreti had requested custom Nikes with the word "sweatshop" placed in the Nike symbol. Nike, of course, disagreed. Once this story was made public over Perreti's website it spread world wide and sparked the conversation and dialogue about Nike's use of sweatshops. Jammers can also organize and participate in mass campaigns. Examples of cultural jamming like Perreti'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 hypercapitalism. Past mass events and ideas have included "Buy Nothing Day", "Digital Detox Week", virtual sit-ins and protests over the Internet, producing ‘subvertisements’ and placing them in public spaces, and creating and enacting ‘placejamming’ 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 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 apparel brands are causing, a subvertisement of Calvin Klein's 'Obsession' was created and played world wide. 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 frequented television in the past years that exposed the deception tobacco companies used to sell their products.
Culture jamming is sometimes confused with artistic appropriation, which is done for art's sake, and vandalism, in which destruction or defacement is the primary goal. Although the end result is not always easily distinguishable from these activities, the intent behind culture jamming is very different from that of artists and vandals. The lines are not always clear-cut; some activities, notably street art, will fall into two or even all three categories.
Recently there have been arguments against the validity and effectiveness of culture jamming. Some argue that culture jamming is easily co-opted and commodified by the market, which tends to ‘defuse’ its potential for consumer resistance. Others posit that the culture jamming strategy of rhetorical sabotage, used by Adbusters, is easily incorporated and appropriated by clever advertising agencies, and thus is not a very powerful means of social change.
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