Page 69 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CULTURE WARS

Named ‘culture jamming’ by San Francisco band Negativland in
1984, but also known as ‘guerrilla art’ or ‘citizens’ art’, this is true
high- and low-tech interactive media. One strategy to ‘unswhoosh’
the Nike advertising campaign was to change the slogan ‘Just Do It’ to
‘Just Stop It’. A separate attempt to jam Nike sawMIT graduate
student Jonah Paretti try to take advantage of Nike’s offer to
personalise shoes by having the company stitch the word ‘sweatshop’
onto his order of a pair of Nike shoes. Although Nike refused, the e-
mail correspondence between Paretti and Nike over the incident was
sent to millions of people around the world. Other jams have included
changing the Apple logo to a skull and transforming the word Shell to
read $hell (with the ‘hell’ emphasised). Internet hackers redirect
visitors to subversive sites. Every year people in the US, Canada,
Australia, Japan and Europe participate in ‘Buy Nothing Day’ in order
to highlight their country’s overconsumption compared with the third
world. In an inversion of shop-lifting, zine makers surreptitiously place
their zines between other publications in bookshops in the hope that
someone will read what otherwise is unacceptable to the publishing
industry.
As these examples highlight, culture jamming is about doing rather
than theorising the media. Or, as Naomi Klein puts it, culture
jamming is ‘writing theory on the streets’ (Klein, 2000: 284).
Adbusters’ founder, Kalle Lasn, writes that ‘communication professors
tell their students everything that’s wrong with the global media
monopoly, but never a word how to fix it’ (Lasn, 2000: 116). Texts on
culture jamming are generally ‘how-to’ guides that celebrate the
public’s right to utilise public space in order to intervene with
corporate messages. They openly assert the audience’s engagement
with texts, refusing to accept that any media is a one-way
communication device, adding a whole new dimension to media
theory’s ‘active audience’.
See also: Anti-globalisation

Further reading: Branwyn (1997); Hazen and Winokur (1997); rtmark.com

CULTURE WARS

The name given to debates about the contemporary condition and
prospects of Enlightenment concepts of art, truth and reason. The
debates circulated within and between academic, intellectual and

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