We live in a world where advertisements and posters dominate the streets, company logos adorn shoes, clothes, caps, cars, buildings and beauty products. And we all know that little can be done in a city without a certain amount of money. Cultural Jamming is a response to the spread of a homogenous global culture dominated by larger corporations.
Cultural Jammers use the medium of media such as advertisements, newspapers, radio, billboards to make a commentary on the media itself or on the issues of society. Basically cultural jammers challenge the manner in which people’s lives are governed and ruled by the marketing industry.
Our value systems have become so warped due to the ‘culture of consumerism’ that we now measure the goodness of a person not by their character or contribution but by their possessions and their ability to acquire more. We are continuously bombarded by advertisements which make us feel that we need to buy more in order to be happy individuals accepted by society. The life of most products are short so as to ensure that more products can be manufacture, so that we continuously buy more, so that companies earn a profit and so that some where down the line or more appropriately up the line a group of people or an individual gets richer by the day. As we buy more we gradually crowd our minds and our environments with things we really do not need.
Cultural Jammers fight this, they fight consumerism. The term was coined by a San Franscio band: Negativland in 1984. Cultural jammers alter corporate logos, distribute advertisement parodies, spoofs, they jam radio broadcasts, deface billboards, construct fake newspaper advertisements and develop websites to disrupt the message of major corporatives.
The concept of cultural jamming was introduced because certain groups of people were alarmed to observe that the role of the ‘citizen’ had shifted to that of a consumer. If one were to observe the habits of people, one would come to the obvious conclusion that a majority of the population indulges in consumer orientated activities such as shopping, visiting the movie theater or eating at restaurants in their free time.
Of course there is nothing wrong in being a consumer. However the disturbing part of the current situation is that commercial media and public entertainment is carefully designed to isolate people from politics and other ‘real world ‘problems. The atomization of society is occurring at an alarming rate and this leads to the alienation of citizens from the decision making process. The foundation of a democracy rest in the power of the people to choose. These days the power to choose, seems to have fallen into the hands of an increasingly niche group of people. Media in a way works as a tool to ‘mass hypnotize.’ It shows us colorful pictures, painted faces, beautiful things and we believe.
Cultural jammers convert easily identifiable images such as the Macdonald’s logo into larger questions that reveal the social and economic condition of the workers behind the product, as well the environmental devastation caused by the corporation.
A number of methods are used by the jammers to spread their messages. The following is a brief outline of a few.
Media Hoaxing:
A tool used by cultural jammers wherein a false story (which is extremely convincing) is invented and a newspaper or a news channel is persuaded to print or publish it without double-checking, so that the message embedded in the false story is spread. An example of this would be the one carried out by two political artists from the U.S known as the "Yes Men." They released a fake website known as ‘dow-ethics.com’ which claimed to be the social responsibility program of Dow Chemicals . Dow Chemicals owns Union Carbide the company responsible for the Bhopal Gas tragedy in India. The Yes Men were so convincing in their story that BBC believed dowethics.com to be a genuine website and subsequently invited and interviewed one of the Yes Men, Jude Finnistera who claimed that Dow Corporation would take full responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster that occurred in 1984. This would be done by distributing 12 million dollars among the survivors. The effect of this act was that the Dow Corporation stock dropped 2 billion dollars overnight.
Flash Crowds:
These are crowds comprised of people who suddenly appear in public places to do something unusual for a short period of time around quickly disperse. These crowds are organized through alternative media such as SMS’s or the internet. For example in New York about a hundred people entered a carpet shop. They then proceed to surround an expensive carpet and then they disappeared. Similarly two hundred people entered the lobby of an upscale hotel applauded for 15 seconds and then disappeared.
Shop Droppers:
This is another cultural jamming strategy. In this case shop droppers purchase items, alter them to convey a message and then return the items to the sore shelves where they wll be bought by unsuspecting customers.
An example of this would be the "Barbie Liberation Organization’ or ‘BLO.’ Members of this organization surgically replaced "Teen Talk Barbie’s" voice-box with G.I Joe’s. Thus Barbie instead of saying "Will we never have enough clothes", "I hate Math" and "I Love Shopping" Barbie said "Vengeance is Mine." In addition BLO also replace the Mattel customer service with a sticker asking customers to call their local TV station, which inevitably lead to the spread of BLO’s message across the country.
Ad Busting:
The word consists of ad meaning advertising and busting. And ad-busters do exactly what the legendary Ghost busters did to ghost, bust them. Ad-busters bust corporate owned culture. It is a form of creative resistance attacking billboards, brands and logos to create ‘anti-advertisements.’ Ad busting was started to counteract the global brands who concentrated their energy on advertising and promoting while their products are manufactured by exploiting workers in so called low wage countries.
An interesting example of cultural jamming was the attempt to jam Nike. The famous slogan of Nike "Just Do It" was changed to "Just Do It….. or Else" which was in reference to Nike’s sweat shop practices. Nike was offering the option of customizing shoes in response to this Jonah Puretti, a jammer tried to make Nike stitch the word ‘Sweat Shop’ into the shoes. Nike didn’t do it of course. This incident was wide spread and it brought to light the plight of workers employed by Nike.
More than 75% of Nike’s shoe production occurs in countries where it is illegal to form independent trade unions. Moreover the companies have incorporated themselves so firmly into the economy of these countries that were the companies to leave the entire economy would come crashing down, Thus even if the workers were to protest about the low wages the company would threaten to pull out and go to countries which have even lower wage rates such as China which has a daily wage of 80 cents or about thirty rupees.There was an incident when workers in Indonesia protested against Nike’s low wages where upon many of these protestors were arrested while other’s simply disappeared.
If Nike were to use just 1 % of its annual budget of 280 million dollars it could easily raise the income of all its Indonesian workers above the poverty line. But Nike won’t do this because it knows very clearly that if this happens its workers will begin to save money, start local enterprises and Nike would loose its source of cheap labour, so Nike does nothing.
Other companies which the cultural jammers protested against was Disney, Disney has sweat shops were people are paid 6 cents or two rupees forty paisa for every pair of ‘101 Dalmations’ outfit that is made. This outfit then sells for about twenty dollars or rupees eight hundred. In Salvador workers get 12 cents ( rupees four, eight paisa) per Gap t-shirt that sells for twenty dollars. In the U.S workers are paid 40 cents for Guess T-shirts that sell for 58 dollars a piece.
Other examples of cultural jamming was changing the ‘Apple’ log to a skull and changing the word ‘Shell’ to $hell. The changing of Macdonald’s to Macdeath. Given below is an example of adbusting done on Macdonald's.
Then there was the ‘Whirl-Mart’ which is an event hosted in order to mock the absurdity of the shopping process. This is done by organizing a crowd to walk around the Wal-Mart in an apparent daze for hours buying nothing. Also there are "Buy Nothing Day" which is held every year in the U.S, Canada, Australia, Japan and Europe. There are Black spot shoes which are splitting replicas of shoes manufactured by Nike but where the Nike Logo is usually present on these shoes there is a Black Spot.
Other Examples of Adbusting:
On Nike:
Busting done on Pepsi:
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