Origins Of The Term "Culture Jamming"

Coined by the collage band Negativland on its release JamCon '84, the phrase "culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming: that public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies.

Although the term was coined by Negativland, culture jamming can be traced as far back as the 1950s. One particularly influential group that was active in Europe called themselves the Situationists and was led by Guy Debord. Their main argument was based on the idea 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. Situationalists saw everything from television to radio as a threat.

One can attempt to trace the roots of culture jamming in medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted as a subversion of the social hierarchy (in Rabelais and his World). More recent precursors might include: the media-savvy agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield, the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of '60s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman, the German concept ofSpaßguerilla, and in the Situationist International (SI) of the 1960s. The SI first compared its own activities to radio jamming in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla communication within mass media to sow confusion within the dominant culture.

Mark Dery's New York Times article on culture jamming, "The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax" 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", 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, began promoting aspects of culture jamming after Dery introduced 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 cites Dery and focuses on the work of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada.