Culture Jamming

Culture jamming appropriates a dominant cultural form and then alters it in a way that becomes a comment on the form itself, often with a critical edge. The goal is to disrupt the easy flow of cultural communication taking place through corporate texts and products and to expose underlying processes or assumptions that are commonly taken at face value. It is a tactic used by activists associated with a wide variety of social movements, including the anticonsumerism and antiglobalization movements. Its success is ultimately tied to viewers' ability to see through the façade of similarity to the criticism embedded in the “jam.”

Culture jamming has been associated with the Dada, surrealist, and Situationist movements. For many of the artists and activists who worked within those milieus, everyday objects became the means through which they expressed critiques of contemporary society and culture. The term culture jamming is credited to collage band Negativland, who, in their release Jam Con ‘84, likened culture jamming to the practice of jamming broadcasting. They argue that cultural communication can be jammed in much the same way, because the jammer interferes with cultural communication in an attempt to inscribe it with alternative meaning that is critical of the original.

The analogy is not exact, given that broadcasts are jammed to block their message entirely, but in doing this, culture jammers work with the same iconography and aesthetics as their targets, within the same cultural, and sometimes geographical, spaces. However, the texts which these activist artists massage to reinscribe with critical content tend, at least at a rapid glance, to resemble what they critique. What results is a nuanced form of critique where the jammer's reworking of the original may be entirely missed.

A wide variety of cultural objects serve as the targets of culture jamming activity; advertisements, pop cultural icons and products (such as logos, dolls, and compact discs), and websites serve as a few examples. Perhaps the most commonly cited and experienced culture jamming form is the sub-vertisement. An original advertisement is the starting point for this activity, of which the content is then subtly, or not so subtly, altered while staying true to the original's aesthetic features. Subvertising is done on small and large scales, with magazine, television, and billboard advertising serving as catalysts. Subvertisements are used to critique anything [Page 153]from the specific product to advertising practices and consumer culture in general.

Culture jamming can be expanded to apply to cultural processes and behaviors. In the activity of media hoaxing, for example, culture jammers lead journalists to believe they are presenting an honest story when, in fact, the story is completely made up. Prominent media hoaxer Joey Skaggs uses this tactic to point out the flaws in journalistic practices. The Yes Men's numerous pranks posing as World Trade Organization officials at trade conferences around the world serve as an example of culture jamming that attempts to disrupt common perceptions of globalization by upsetting expectations of the organization's behavior and policy.

It is through the upsetting of common expectations that culture jamming is expected to have most of its critical power. Ideally, at the moment a viewer realizes that what he or she is experiencing is not an original, a critical reassessment of the cultural norms associated with that form should follow. In this way, culture jamming challenges people to think critically about the ideologies that sustain a host of social, cultural, and economic practices. It is used by activists associated with any number of social movements. And its creative nature means that any specific tactics enacted are limited only by the practitioners' imagination.

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