Culture jamming
[5] Culture jamming often entails using mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, commonly using the original medium's communication method.
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.
[citation needed] Modern precursors might include: the media-savvy agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield, the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of 1960s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman, Joey Skaggs, the German concept of Spaßguerilla, and in the Situationist International (SI) of the 1950s and 1960s.
[citation needed] 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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
