Culture Jamming

Culture jamming is a form of consumer activism, undertaken by individuals or groups, that attempts to contest the ostensible predominance of commercially oriented, consumerist culture by exposing its contradictions and shortcomings. Culture jamming is conceptually inspired by the technique of electronically interfering with (i.e., “jamming”) radio or television broadcast signals for military or political purposes, and it comprises a variety of strategies and tactics. These include altering corporate or other institutional messages, products, and/or identities; parodying or satirizing corporate or other institutional communications, artifacts, and images; and otherwise appropriating or mimicking corporate or other institutional references or frames, usually in critique.

Credit for coining the term is generally given to the San Francisco–based performance/activist group Negativland, who first used it in a 1984 live radio broadcast later issued in recorded form. Other early practitioners include filmmakers Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, whose 1989 protest of a Canadian pro-logging industry public relations campaign led to the founding of Adbusters magazine, an influential journal for reporting culture jamming activity. Culture jamming is also known as “semiological” or “meme,” the latter in reference to the definition of meme as a unit of information (an image, an idea, an object, etc.) that serves to reproduce culture in the same way a gene serves to reproduce an organism.

Interrupting and redirecting the system of cultural reproduction is one of culture jamming's main objectives. A primary method for accomplishing this is détournement (turning around, rerouting, or hijacking), an artistic technique of appropriating, deconstructing, and re-presenting images and texts that was initially used by the postwar French avant-garde movement known as the Situationist International. Culture jamming is often directed against major brands, trademarked products, and advertisements as perceived symbols of increasing corporate control over all aspects of contemporary life, confronting the ideological and material apparatus of the “society of the spectacle” against which the Situationists also arrayed themselves (Debord 1967/1995).

Other terms used to describe these tactics are subvertising (a blend of the words subvert and advertising) and hacktivism (a blend of hack and activism). The former refers to spoofs or parodies of logos, trademarks, advertisements, consumer products, and such made by either altering existing materials or by creating new ones. The latter refers to the more general practice of using digital tools (as in computer hacking) for subversion or to pursue political ends. These methods have been greatly aided by the availability of desktop publishing software and other creative capabilities made possible by the proliferation of personal computers at relatively modest prices when compared to traditional, more capital-intensive forms of media production, such as print or broadcast media. It is perhaps predictable, then, that culture jamming, properly called, first emerged in proximity to the high-tech enclaves of Silicon Valley in California and the corporate headquarters of Microsoft in the Pacific Northwest. Examples of culture jamming can now be found around the world. Image-intensive online social networking sites, such as YouTube and Flickr, have also greatly expanded the reach of culture jamming practice.

The activist group Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) is one of the best-known examples of subvertising. Based in San Francisco, BLF has intervened in corporate marketing communications campaigns since 1977. Its first project was to alter the billboard message of a cigarette brand from “I'm realistic. I smoke Fact” to “I'm real sick. I smoke Fact.” BLF produced new letters in a type font, character size, and color to mimic the original text and glued them over existing printed copy, making it virtually impossible to perceive that the message was not the one intended by the advertiser. The intervention meant to point out that no tobacco cigarette is healthy, not even those marketed as “low tar” or “low nicotine.”

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