The reading is titled ‘Pranking rhetoric: “culture jamming” as media activism’ which is written by Christine Harold. Her main focus in the essay is theory of culture jamming and the rhetorical appropriation of pranking. She has stated that the consuming desire of consumers is controlled by the corporate powers and the control from the powers has been increased in recent years, consumers are so passive in the case that some may not resist from this increase. Therefore, culture jamming is a very way to resist from the act of the corporate powers. So what culture jamming is?
Culture jamming is a ‘rhetorical process of intervention and invention’ which is to say it interrupts some power structures or discourses and uses the original resources existed to recreate or invent a new idea to challenge or oppose the original one. This introduces noises to the issues, or gives alternatives to audiences to think about the issue critically, or reveal the truth of the issue behind, etc. In the essay, Harold has listed some examples from Adbusters. Adbusters is a medium for global culture jammers to post their culture jammed pieces online in order to ‘change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society’. It not only publishes magazines but also holds campaigns. Here is an example from Adbusters.
This picture shows us the evolution of human beings. And the culture jammed part is the word ‘buyological’ which is assonance of ‘biological’. This means that human’s evolution recently doesn’t evolve not in the way of what human originally do already but with tones of products and brands.
However, Harold stated that what adbusters is doing is not comprehensive as it just asks people to say ‘No!’ to the corporate powers that audiences is not really involved in. So, she has suggested the pranking rhetoric as a tool of culture jamming. Pranking defines as to trick, to fold, and to adorn. What pranksters do is to strategically augment and utilize the precious resources to a new invention which is often comedic in challenging consumer culture. People use this method to resist ‘by playfully and provocatively folding existing cultural forms in on themselves’. This becomes the main characteristics of culture jamming nowadays especially in Hong Kong. Here is an example listed in the essay which is about The Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO). BLO was founded in 1989 and aimed at revealing and correcting the problem of gender – based stereotyping in children’s toys. They have a project of buying hundreds of Barbie and G.I Joe and selling them out during the Christmas shopping season. In the project, they have exchanged the voice box of Barbie and G.I Joe that Barbie would say, ‘Vengeance is mine!’ while G.I Joe would say ‘Let’s plan our dream wedding!’. What amazing is that children loves the edited toys more than the original one.
This kind of resistance not only enhances the involvement of audiences, but also brings large responses to consumerism and corporate power which is provocative.
We have considered 4 questions to the discussion part.
1. Are there any pros and cons of online jamming?
2. Why do you share pieces with culture jamming through online social network like facebook?
3. According to utilitarianism by Immanuel Kant while majority happiness is fulfilled, materials of online jamming would be moral, do you agree? Why?
4. Is there any relationship among protest and online jamming?
For the first question we discussed, this would lead to the effectiveness of online jamming and there are some other advantages rather than resistance aspect. For the second question, this leads to the issue of constructing identity and impression management. Besides, the third question raised concern of utilitarianism by Immanuel Kant as what people shared or jammed is using the original resources like news, drama or movies so morality or ethics can be discussed whether majority happiness is more important than the feelings of minority/the victims and the copyright of the creation. As we have mentioned before, there are some culture jammed products are created to resist in political aspects so we considered the forth question about relationship of protest and online jamming.
To conclude, why does the topic related to our course? First, the medium people share and spread the culture jammed ideas are usually online social network so it has reached the question of online and offline identity that online identity is being constructed while people share the idea. Second, the person, or victim, being culture jammed is actually a cyborg. As the idea of ‘human body should end at skin’ and ‘human has linkage with every part of the body’ has been mentioned in lectures, the person, being edited by technology like Photoshop and slaughtered into different parts to suit in the jammed one, is a cyborg.
By Leung Frances and Ng Angela