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42-461: The Billboard Liberation Front practices culture jamming via altering billboards by changing key words to radically alter the message, often to an anti-corporate message. It started in San Francisco in 1977. Advertising executives informed Jill Posener , author of Spray it Loud (1982), that the executives designed billboards to attract attacks because the changes drew attention to

84-407: A critical analysis of the works of three American sociologists. Debord discusses at length Daniel J. Boorstin 's The Image (1961), arguing that Boorstin missed the concept of Spectacle. In thesis 192, Debord mentions some American sociologists who have described the general project of developed capitalism which "aims to recapture the fragmented worker as a personality well integrated in the group;"

126-501: A demonstration of the retaliatory actions (legal consequences) handed down by the ruling apparatus. The basic unit in which a message is transmitted in culture jamming is the meme . Memes are condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others. The term meme was coined and first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins , but later used by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff , who claimed memes were

168-521: A different form which brings together artists, designers, scholars, and activists to create works that transcend the status quo rather than merely criticize it. The term was coined by Mark 3000 of The Upstairs Burned and Mark 3000 in The Fascist States in a Flint, Michigan fanzine, Death and Gravey , in 1981. Subsequently, it was attributed to having been created in 1984 by Don Joyce of American sound collage band Negativland , with

210-496: A disagreement. Peretti had requested custom Nikes with the word "sweatshop" placed in the Nike symbol. Nike refused. Once this story was made public, it spread worldwide and contributed to the already robust conversation about Nike's use of sweatshops, which had been ongoing for a decade prior to Peretti's 2001 stunt. Jammers can also organize and participate in mass campaigns. Examples of cultural jamming like Perretti's are more along

252-426: A toilet. Another way that social consumer movements hope to utilize culture jamming effectively is by employing a metameme. A metameme is a two-level message that punctures a specific commercial image but does so in a way that challenges some larger aspect of the political culture of corporate domination. An example would be the "true cost" campaign set in motion by Adbusters . "True cost" forced consumers to compare

294-585: A type of media virus . Memes are seen as genes that can jump from outlet to outlet and replicate themselves or mutate upon transmission, just like a virus. Culture jammers will often use common symbols such as the McDonald's golden arches or Nike swoosh to engage people and force them to think about their eating habits or fashion sense. In one example, jammer Jonah Peretti used the Nike symbol to stir debate on sweatshop child labor and consumer freedom. Peretti made public exchanges between himself and Nike over

336-412: A world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false." Debord also draws an equivalence between the role of mass media marketing in the present and the role of religions in the past. The spread of commodity-images by the mass media, produces "waves of enthusiasm for a given product" resulting in "moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of

378-434: Is futile because it is easily co-opted and commodified by the market, which tends to "defuse" its potential for consumer resistance. A newer understanding of the term has been called for that would encourage artists, scholars and activists to come together and create innovative, flexible, and practical mobile art pieces that communicate intellectual and political concepts and new strategies and actions. The Society of

420-410: Is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." In a consumer society, social life is not about living, but about having; the spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and must have. Consequently, social life moves further, leaving a state of "having" and proceeding into a state of "appearing"; namely the appearance of the image. "In

462-460: Is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life." The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images." In his analysis of

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504-534: The Paramount Theatre , the premiere screening of the film Bwana Devil by Arch Oboler took place as the first full-length, color 3-D (aka 'Natural Vision') motion picture. Eyerman took a series of photographs of the audience wearing 3-D glasses . Life magazine used one of the photographs as the cover of a brochure about the 1946-1955 decade. The photograph employed in the Black and Red edition shows

546-529: The Empire of the Signs , a seminal essay that remains the most exhaustive historical, sociopolitical, and philosophical theorization of culture jamming to date. 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

588-538: The Internet, producing ‘subvertisements' and placing them in public spaces, and creating and enacting ‘place jamming' projects where public spaces are reclaimed and nature is re-introduced into urban places. The most effective form of jamming is to use an already widely recognizable meme to transmit the message. Once viewers are forced to take a second look at the mimicked popular meme they are forced out of their comfort zone. Viewers are presented with another way to view

630-475: The Liverpool street underground station to host a flashmob to sell their mobile services. Culture jamming is a form of disruption that plays on the emotions of viewers and bystanders. Jammers want to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement . Activists that utilize this tactic are counting on their meme to pull on

672-464: The SI argued humans had become passive recipients of the spectacle , a simulated reality that generates the desire to consume, and positions humans as obedient consumerist cogs within the efficient and exploitative productivity loop of capitalism. Through playful activity, individuals could create situations , the opposite of spectacles. For the SI, these situations took the form of the dérive , or

714-733: The Spectacle The Society of the Spectacle ( French : La société du spectacle ) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord where he develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle . The book is considered a seminal text for the Situationist movement. Debord published a follow-up book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988. The work is a series of 221 short theses in

756-491: 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. The cultural critic Mark Dery traces the origins of culture jamming to medieval carnival , which Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted, in Rabelais and his World, as an officially sanctioned subversion of the social hierarchy. Modern precursors might include:

798-457: The audience in "a virtually trance-like state of absorption, their faces grim, their lips pursed;" however, in the one chosen by Life , "the spectators are laughing, their expressions of hilarity conveying the pleasure of an uproarious, active spectatorship." The Black and Red version also is flipped left to right, and cropped. Despite widespread association among English-speaking readers, Debord had nothing to do with this cover illustration, which

840-587: The dominant culture. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls formed to expose discrimination and corruption in the art world . Mark Dery's New York Times article on culture jamming, "The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax" was the first mention, in the mainstream media, of the phenomenon; Dery later expanded on this article in his 1993 Open Magazine pamphlet, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in

882-601: The emotional strings of people and evoke some type of reaction. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock , shame , fear , and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change. Culture jamming also intersects with forms of legal transgression. Semiotic disobedience, for example, involves both authorial and proprietary disobedience, while techniques such as coercive disobedience comprise acts of culture jamming combined with

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924-400: The examples mentioned by Debord are David Riesman , author of The Lonely Crowd (1950), and William H. Whyte , author of the 1956 bestseller The Organization Man . Among the 1950s sociologists who are usually compared to Riesman and Whyte, is C. Wright Mills , the author of White Collar: The American Middle Classes . Riesman's "Lonely Crowd" term is also used in thesis 28. Because

966-509: The flow of the spectacle." The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism , dealing with issues such as class alienation , cultural homogenization , and mass media . When Debord says that "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation," he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord says, have supplanted genuine human interaction. Thus, Debord's fourth thesis is: "The spectacle

1008-441: The form of aphorisms . Each thesis contains one paragraph. Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having , and having into merely appearing ." This condition, according to Debord,

1050-827: The human labor cost and conditions and environmental drawbacks of products to the sales costs. Another example would be the "Truth" campaigns that exposed the deception tobacco companies used to sell their products. Following critical scholars like Paulo Freire , Culture jams are also being integrated into the university classroom "setting 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." For example, students disrupt public space to bring attention to community concerns or utilize subvertisements to engage with media literacy projects. Some scholars and activists, such as Amory Starr and Joseph D. Rumbo, have argued that culture jamming

1092-496: The improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea." This passage concerning plagiarism is itself directly lifted from Poésies by French-Uruguayan author Isidore Lucien Ducasse, better known as the Comte de Lautréamont . In particular, the original French text for both Debord and Lautréamont's versions of

1134-477: The language and rhetoric of mainstream culture to subversively critique the social institutions that produce that culture. Tactics include editing company logos to critique the respective companies, products, or concepts they represent, or wearing fashion statements that criticize the current fashion trends by deliberately clashing with them. Culture jamming often entails using mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, commonly using

1176-476: The lines of tactics that radical consumer social movements would use. These movements push people to question the taken-for-granted assumption that consuming is natural and good and aim to disrupt the naturalization of consumer culture; they also seek to create systems of production and consumption that are more humane and less dominated by global corporate late capitalism . Past mass events and ideas have included Buy Nothing Day , virtual sit-ins and protests over

1218-645: 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 power of the culture jam to disrupt the status quo is currently being threatened by increasing commercial incorporation. For example, T-Mobile utilized

1260-598: The media-savvy agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield , the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of 1960s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman , Joey Skaggs , the German concept of Spaßguerilla , and in 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

1302-501: The meme and are forced to think about the implications presented by the jammer. More often than not, when this is used as a tactic the jammer is going for shock value. For example, to make consumers aware of the negative body image that big-name fashion brands are frequently accused of causing, a subvertisement of Calvin Klein 's 'Obsession' was created and played worldwide. It depicted a young woman with an eating disorder throwing up into

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1344-621: The notion of the spectacle involves real life being replaced by representations of life, Society of the Spectacle is also concerned with the notion of authenticity versus inauthenticity, a theme which is revisited in Chapter 8, "Negation and Consumption within Culture". In Debord's treatment, modern society forces culture to constantly re-appropriate or re-invent itself, copying and re-packaging old ideas. Thesis 207 makes this point, rhetorically: "Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in

1386-425: The old religious fetishism". Debord contends further that "the remains of religion and of the family (the principal relic of the heritage of class power) and the moral repression they assure, merge whenever the enjoyment of this world is affirmed–this world being nothing other than repressive pseudo-enjoyment." "The monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history, ... These religions arose on

1428-722: The original medium's communication method. Culture jamming is also a form of subvertising . Culture jamming is intended to expose questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture , and can be considered a reaction against politically imposed social conformity . Prominent examples of culture jamming include the adulteration of billboard advertising by the Billboard Liberation Front and contemporary artists such as Ron English . Culture jamming may involve street parties and protests . While culture jamming usually focuses on subverting or critiquing political and advertising messages, some proponents focus on

1470-452: The passage are identical: "Les idées s'améliorent. Le sens des mots y participe. Le plagiat est nécessaire. Le progrès l'implique. Il serre de près la phrase d'un auteur, se sert de ses expressions, efface une idée fausse, la remplace par l'idée juste." The book cover of the 1983 edition is derived from a photograph by the Life magazine photographer, J. R. Eyerman . On November 26, 1952, at

1512-419: The past, humans dealt with life and the consumer market directly. They argued that this spontaneous way of life was slowly deteriorating as a direct result of the new "modern" way of life. Situationists saw everything from television to radio as a threat and argued that life in industrialized areas, driven by capitalist forces, had become monotonous, sterile, gloomy, linear, and productivity-driven. In particular,

1554-585: The products. The BLF were aware of this possibility and considered invoicing advertisers including Chiat Day for the BLF's work. In 2013, Complex Magazine named the BLF #27 of The 50 Most Influential Street Artists of All Time. The BLF cooperated with a range of other art groups, like Guerrilla Girls , monochrom and Joey Skaggs . Culture jamming Culture jamming employs techniques originally associated with Letterist International , and later Situationist International known as détournement . It uses

1596-484: 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. One particularly influential group that was active in Europe was the Situationist International and was led by Guy Debord . The SI asserted that in

1638-460: The release of their album JamCon '84 . The phrase "culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming , where public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies used by governments. In one of the tracks of the album, Joyce stated: As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard... directs

1680-462: The soil of history, and established themselves there. But there they still preserve themselves in radical opposition to history." Debord defines them as Semi-historical religions . "The growth of knowledge about society, which includes the understanding of history as the heart of culture, derives from itself an irreversible knowledge, which is expressed by the destruction of God." In Chapter 8, "Negation and Consumption Within Culture", Debord includes

1722-506: The spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution. In the Situationist view, situations are actively constructed and characterized by "a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience". Debord encouraged the use of détournement , "which involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt

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1764-437: The spectacular society, Debord notes that the quality of life is impoverished, with such a lack of authenticity that human perceptions are affected; and an attendant degradation of knowledge, which in turn hinders critical thought . Debord analyzes the use of knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present. In this way,

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