Culture jamming

Culture jamming (sometimes also guerrilla communication)^[1][2] is a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements^[3] to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It is often described as a way of drawing attention to the methods through which mass society and media institutions shape public perception.^[4]

Culture jamming employs techniques originally associated with the Letterist International and later with the Situationist International, including détournement. It uses the language and rhetoric of mainstream culture to critique the social institutions that produce that culture. Tactics include editing company logos to critique the companies, products, or concepts they represent, or using fashion statements that deliberately clash with current fashion trends.^[5] Culture jamming often uses mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about mass media itself, commonly by adopting the communication methods of the original medium. Culture jamming is also a form of subvertising.^[6][7]

Culture jamming is generally intended to highlight and challenge political assumptions within commercial culture, and has been discussed as a response to socially imposed conformity. Prominent examples include the alteration of billboard advertising by the Billboard Liberation Front and works by contemporary artists such as Ron English. Culture jamming may also involve street parties and protests. While it often focuses on subverting or critiquing political and advertising messages, some proponents emphasize forms that bring together artists, designers, scholars, and activists^[8] to create works that go beyond criticism of the status quo.^[9][10] In addition to these political and cultural aims, researchers have noted that pleasure and humor can play an important role in sustaining participation. Analysts have argued that fun can connect individual acts of subversion to a broader, imagined protest community, helping separate actions appear as part of a shared project. This affective style has been interpreted as both drawing on and resisting the dominant emotion regime of late capitalism, with emotional engagement functioning as both a tactic and an aim.^[11]

The term was coined by Don Joyce^[12] of the American sound collage band Negativland, in connection with their album JamCon '84.^[13][14][15] The phrase "culture jamming" derives from the idea of radio jamming,^[14] in which public frequencies can be used for independent communication or to disrupt dominant frequencies used by governments. In one of the tracks of the album, Joyce stated:^[14]

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.^[16] One influential group active in Europe was the Situationist International, led by Guy Debord. The SI argued that earlier forms of everyday life and social interaction were being transformed by modern consumer society. Situationists regarded mass media, including television and radio, as central elements of this transformation.^[17] They argued that life in industrialized areas, shaped by capitalist forces, had become increasingly monotonous, standardized, and productivity-driven. In particular, the SI argued that humans had become passive recipients of the spectacle, a mediated social reality that generates the desire to consume and positions people within the productivity loop of capitalism.^[10][18] Through playful activity, individuals could create situations, understood as alternatives to 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]

The cultural critic Mark Dery traces the origins of culture jamming to medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted, in Rabelais and His World and other writings, as an officially sanctioned inversion of the social hierarchy.^[19] Other possible modern precursors include the media-oriented agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield, the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of 1960s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman and Joey Skaggs, the German concept of Spaßguerilla, and the Situationist International (SI) of the 1950s and 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. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls formed to expose discrimination and corruption in the art world.^[20]

Dery's 1990 New York Times article on culture jamming, "The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax"^[14] was an early mainstream media discussion 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,^[21] an influential essay on the history, politics, and theory of culture jamming. 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 disruptive power of culture jamming can be affected by commercial incorporation.^[10] For example, T-Mobile used Liverpool Street Station to host a flashmob to promote its mobile services.

Culture jamming is a form of disruption that often appeals to the emotions of viewers and bystanders. It seeks to interrupt the habitual ways in which consumers interpret popular advertising and to produce a détournement.^[17] Activists using this tactic often rely on memes to evoke a reaction. The responses sought by cultural jammers commonly include behavioral change and political action. Four emotions are often discussed in this context: shock, shame, fear, and anger, which have been described as possible catalysts for social change.^[22] Culture jamming also intersects with forms of legal transgression. Semiotic disobedience, for example, involves both authorial and proprietary disobedience,^[23] while techniques such as coercive disobedience combine acts of culture jamming with demonstrations of the legal consequences imposed by authorities.^[24]

An early American practitioner associated with culture jamming, Joey Skaggs, began staging elaborate media hoaxes in the 1960s as a form of social critique and performance art. His satirical projects, including the Cathouse for Dogs, a fictitious brothel for canines, and Comacocoon, presented as a sensory-deprivation vacation therapy, targeted institutional authority and drew attention to the media's susceptibility to sensationalism. Skaggs' interventions have been described as important to the development of culture jamming as a strategy for media activism and public discourse.^[25]

The meme is often described as a basic unit through which messages are transmitted in culture jamming. Memes are condensed images, phrases, sounds, or behaviors that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations and can be imitated and transmitted by others. The term meme was coined and first popularized by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, but was later used by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff, who described memes as a type of media virus.^[26] Memes have been compared to genes because they can move from one outlet to another and replicate or mutate during transmission.^[27]

Culture jammers often use widely recognized symbols, such as the McDonald's golden arches or Nike swoosh, to engage viewers and encourage reflection on consumer habits, including eating habits or fashion choices.^[28] In one example, jammer Jonah Peretti used the Nike symbol to draw attention to debates about sweatshop labor and consumer freedom. Peretti made public exchanges between himself and Nike over a disagreement. He had requested custom Nikes with the word "sweatshop" placed in the Nike symbol. Nike refused. Once this story was made public, it spread widely and contributed to the ongoing conversation^[29] about allegations concerning Nike's use of sweatshop labor,^[28] which had been underway for a decade prior to Peretti's 2001 action.

Jammers can also organize and participate in mass campaigns. Examples such as Peretti's are related to tactics used by radical consumer social movements. These movements encourage people to question the assumption that consumption is natural or inherently positive, and seek to challenge the naturalization of consumer culture. They also seek to promote systems of production and consumption that are more humane and less dominated by global corporate forms of late capitalism.^[30]

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, in which public spaces are reclaimed and nature is reintroduced into urban areas.^[31]

One commonly discussed form of jamming uses an already recognizable meme to transmit a message. When viewers encounter a modified version of a familiar image or idea, they may be prompted to reconsider its meaning and the implications presented by the jammer.^[17] This tactic often uses shock value. For example, to draw attention to the negative body image that major fashion brands are frequently accused of causing, a subvertisement of Calvin Klein's "Obsession" was created and circulated as part of an Adbusters campaign. It depicted a young woman with an eating disorder vomiting into a toilet.^[32]

Another way that social consumer movements use culture jamming is by employing a metameme. A metameme is a two-level message that modifies a specific commercial image while also challenging a larger aspect of the political culture of corporate domination.^[28] An example is the "true cost" campaign set in motion by Adbusters. "True cost" asked consumers to compare the human labor costs, working conditions, and environmental effects of products with their sale prices. Another example is the "Truth" campaign, which exposed deceptive practices used by tobacco companies to sell their products.

Following critical scholars such as Paulo Freire, culture jams have also been integrated into university classroom settings, "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 may disrupt public space to bring attention to community concerns or use subvertisements to engage with media literacy projects.

• Artivist
• Billboard hacking
• Broadcast signal intrusion
• Détournement
• Flash mob
• Sculpture Mobs
• Happening
• Practical joke topics
• Steal This Album!
• Steal This Book

Groups

• Billboard Liberation Front
• Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions
• Crimethinc
• Guerrilla Girls
• Merry Pranksters
• monochrom
• Operation Mindfuck
• The Yes Men
• Youth International Party

Some scholars and activists, such as Amory Starr and Joseph D. Rumbo, have argued that culture jamming can be limited by its susceptibility to co-optation and commodification by the market. According to this criticism, the use of advertising techniques, brand imagery, and media spectacle can make culture jamming vulnerable to being absorbed into the same commercial systems it seeks to challenge, thereby "defusing" its potential for consumer resistance.^[33][34]

Critics have also questioned whether culture jamming produces lasting political change or primarily offers symbolic acts of dissent within consumer culture. Because many culture jamming practices depend on recognizable corporate signs and mass-media formats, they may also reinforce the visibility of the brands or institutions they criticize. Related critiques have argued that artistic and activist interventions may remain dependent on the institutional, commercial, or subcultural contexts they seek to challenge. In the theory of context hacking, Frank Apunkt Schneider, Johannes Grenzfurthner, and Günther Friesinger describe social, artistic, legal, media, and market contexts as systems that can be analyzed and modified. They present this approach as a broader form of intervention that addresses not only media signs but also the contexts and rules within which cultural practices operate.^[35]

Supporters and some later theorists have called for a broader understanding of culture jamming, one that would encourage artists, scholars, and activists to create innovative, flexible, and practical mobile art pieces that communicate intellectual and political concepts as well as new strategies and actions.^[9]

• Anti-corporate activism
• Banksy
• Brandalism
• Context Hacking
• Counterculture
• Critical theory
• Dada
• Doppelgänger brand image
• The Firesign Theatre
• Kuso
• Minority influence
• Protest art
• Subvertising
• Tactical media

• Branwyn, Gareth (1996). Jamming the Media: A Citizen's Guide—Reclaiming the Tools of Communication. California: Chronicle Books ISBN 9780811817950
• 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. ASIN B0006P19L8
• King, Donovan (2004). University of Calgary. Optative Theatre: A Critical Theory for Challenging Oppression and Spectacle
• Klein, Naomi (2000). No Logo London: Flamingo. ISBN 9780312421434
• Kyoto Journal: Culture Jammer's Guide to Enlightenment
• Lasn, Kalle (1999) Culture Jam. New York: Eagle Brook. ISBN 978-0688178055
• LeVine, Mark (2005) Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil. Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications. ISBN 978-1851683659
• 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. ISBN 978-1-4798-0620-1
• 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. ISBN 9781849350167.
• 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. ISSN 1536-1810
• 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 & Critique 8 (3): 393–413.

• McIntyre, Iain (2013). How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Protests, Graffiti & Political Mischief-Making from Across Australia. PM Press. ISBN 978-1-60486-880-7.
• DeLaure, Marilyn; Fink, Moritz; eds. (2017). Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance. New York University Press. ISBN 978-1-4798-0620-1.

• Culture Jamming page from the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement