Magazines like Jack Ruby Slippers and Adbusters have begun to promote the concept of "culture jamming." What does it mean? And what are its roots? According to important culture jammers such as Mark Dery, it is an attempt to "jam" the transmissions of our corporate-controlled, media-consumer-industrial complex. Dery suggests that we consider our mental environment - the realms of signification we encounter every day, especially in omnipresent advertising - and that we take direct political action so as to protect that environment just as fiercely as the 'natural' or physical one.
The origins of culture jamming probably lie with the Situationist International in France, and its practice of detournement or inversion. The roots of detournement itself probably lie in the Feast of Fools and other medieval ceremonies where the social order was inverted and the authorities paraded around in fools' costume, revealing their "natural" or "divine" authority to be socially created and maintained. Situationist Guy deBord suggested in the 60s that we were living in a "society of the spectacle" - where real leisure and real living had been replaced by pre-packaged experiences and media-created events. Other Situationists practiced detournement as a response: most would take images from advertising, the mass media, or popular culture, and change the dialogue subtly so as to reveal the ideologies masked in everyday media experience.
Writing in the Situationist vein, the French philosopher Baudrillard calls our postmodern existence "hyperreality." Real experiences and things have been replaced with simulacra - copies without an original. Due to the power of mass media advertising, our relationship to the signifier has changed. Now it hides the absence of a signified: conceals the inability to deliver real satisfaction by cleverly simulating it. Part of our hyperreal lives is the fact that our simulations are more real than real. Given a better imitation, people choose it over the real thing; hence Disney's Matterhorn enjoys more visitors than the real one in Switzerland. More insidiously, through various obfuscations, people come to think the simulacrum is the real McCoy, and forget about the historical and physical reality it represents.
Modern advertising critics like Mark Crispin Miller often note the hidden messages concealed within the cool graphics and media saturation of Madison Avenue and MTV. Originally, they suggest, advertising often connected the product being sold with some sort of self-image or way of life (pastoral, pleasant, family-oriented.) Often, it was conveyed that the product would somehow confer various advantages - popularity, sexiness, fame, success, power, even individuality. Today, ads are filled with a strange sort of rugged selfishness, misanthropy, and mean-spiritedness ("touch my doritos and die.") A person is told sternly to buy as much as they can of the product but never to share with friends. "Get your own," they're told.
While various moral crusaders seek to combat the various sexual innuendos of TV programming, they rarely challenge the more subtle but socially disruptive images found in commercials and other advertising.
The product, no longer able to offer satisfaction on its own ground ("a potato chip is a chip is a chip"), instead offers the consumer a chance to be part of a certain 'crowd' or 'scene.' They belong to a cool "product tribe," revelling in the image and sensibility that the product somehow mystically confers - the fetishism of commodities, hyperaccelerated for Generation X. Analysts of postindustrial America suggest this is the secret hidden within these advertising campaigns - that more and more people are being sold style, image, and celebrity, since there is no substance or material satisfaction to the product-in-itself. Concealed within the jump-cut flash of postmodern advertising is a simple code: consumption is a mode of transcendence, a way to take part in something larger than yourself, "the Pepsi Generation."
Corporations utilize various techniques to carve Americans into various market profiles - not based on what products they use, but on what media messages they respond to. In other words, they are to be sold on the images they want to project to themselves and others, and not on the intrinsic usefulness of consumer items. Whatever values they supposedly respond to, are translated into clever pitches, suggesting that the product somehow represents or embodies those values. Subliminal seduction has never been that important in advertising, despite the hype, but the use of semiotic strategies certainly has. Products are often "pitched" to specific ethnic groups, minorities, or subcultures, often using the Marcusian co-optation strategy of appealing to their own sense of difference or deviance. ("Wear our clothes, and then you'll be a real rebel.")
Is there a way out of hyperreality and the society of the spectacle? Yes.

You can take charge of your mental environment, and become a culture jammer. Culture jamming means semiotic jujitsu - using media power against itself. The Adbusters' Media Foundation does this all the time with famous spoofs of the Absolut Vodka ads ("Absolut death," etc.) Other culture jammers often take commercials or TV programs and replace the dialogue and soundtrack with something subversive. Yet others take to billboards or road signs and cleverly rearrange the letters to say something different. As one activist suggests, "where critique is no longer a possibility, parody is always an alternative response."

In our global media village of multinational media conglomerates and satellite TV, culture jamming is necessarily a global enterprise. As the Western consumerist message increasingly spreads to the masses of the Third World/Periphery, it is the task of culture jammers to go there too and jam the signal. Surely, some have remarked, we must be living in hyperreality when Taco Bell opens in Mexico City and Pizza Hut opens in Rome. Or when more schoolchildren know Joe Camel better than they can recognize the current president. Slowly, the lines between information and entertainment are being blurred, producing a fuzzy sort of "infotainment" in which real facts are irrelevant but audience ratings are key.

Culture jamming is more than just a clever game. In an era in which conspicuous consumption is slowly eating up the entire planet, it may just be the key to survival itself. We may not be able to stop the signal at its source, but at least we can jam its reception. The point is to awaken people to their media-controlled life, to stop and notice the signal and noise that is their mental environment. Like "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in They Live we may suddenly notice a host of things we previously ignored.

Messages from all around us telling is to sleep, procreate, consume, but not to question. Culture jamming shows these hidden Barthian 'mythologies' - through satire, it forces people to confront that which seems most 'natural' to them. Today, more than ever, culture jamming is the key weapon in the 2000's information 'war,' the outcome of which could well determine our collective fate.





As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascinations.When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.... Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Listen to your conscience insted of the news, the news and the truth are not the same thing.
Keep fighting the good fight, with your minds as weapons!
......................................kosmicdebris...................................
Treat the earth well.
It was not given to you by your parents,
it was loaned to you by your children.
We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors,
we borrow it from our Children.

Click on the above for the whole 20 minutes or below for a preview.
My thoughts for 2008.……my grandfather made certain that my father's tomorrows were better than his yesterdays, he left the world knowing that his sons would never face the hardships that he himself faced. He provided a standard of living for his sons that was above where he came from. My father also did the same for me, my life was easier and my standard of living was higher than that of my fathers. Both left me a legacy to pass on to my sons a better future than that of my past.
My generation is in charge now, today we, my peers, hold all of the powerful leadership positions in government, education, business and religion. I cannot honestly make the same promise to my children that my father and grandfathers did to their children. If current attitudes prevail the hope for the future will only be concerned with having a future at all, not the hope that our offspring will flourish and prosper, but have the tools necessary to survive a very uncertain tomorrow.
Mankind's trials today differ from those of the past in that the problem is reaching critical mass in many areas no man has ever faced before. By that I mean, poverty and not just in terms of natural resources and overpopulation, but spiritual poverty. Our humanity is being educated out of us and our children's minds are being transformed into nothing more than mental hard-drive data dumps. Nothing less than soulless mechanical clones that race towards death and others that only wait, anesthetized by consumerism and the mass media's allure, for death to overtake their clueless hollow shells.
Its my fault, like John Lennon said, "life is what happened when I was busy making other plans." I cannot change unless I own my mistakes and admit I have a problem, neither can the world. When I have felt wounded by my brothers or the world and society retaliates, all I have to do is look honestly in hindsight to realize that I made a decision, based on self, that put me in a position to be hurt. This kind of selfishness is killing the world. If the world shakes and bakes, I helped, either by my silence or my egocentric motives. It will also heal with my help, too.
I don't have to be an environmental scientist to see what is happening or a prophet to know what is going to happen next. Denial and ignorance is the fuel that feeds the apathetic fire of our own self-immolation in the name of selfish greed. The Devine spark of our eternal light is being extinguished by our own willful indifferent hands.
Science and technology will never solve the lack of ethical and moral values problems we have today, our educational and religious institutions have failed to teach us these things that we really need to know to survive. "You say that you ask only for the Truth and yet you speak like a narrow and ignorant fanatic who refuses to believe in anything but the religion in which he was born. All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth."
Starting today, we as a society have to redefine what it means to be human. How often do you say or hear other people say "Well, we're human.." or "That's just what people do." as justification for certain behaviors? Do you ever question such comments?
Today is a day to evaluate and, perhaps, readjust your personal definition of being human.
You are an amazing creature. You can be whatever you want to be. The only things that can stop you are your own beliefs about yourself and that is not intended in a corny, self-help sort of way.
For example, you may have heard the claim that we are not meant to be with one person for our entire lives and it's not logical to expect someone to be faithful forever. That is their belief and their choice. And yet, there are those who do fall in love once and make it last a lifetime. That is their belief and their choice.
You may have heard someone justify another's violent outburst by claiming, "They're human. Anyone would be angry in that situation." And yet, there are those who are able to remain peaceful and in control of themselves at all times.
Are those people not human? Of course they are! But they have a different perception of what it means to be human.
Challenge your definition of humanity today.
... Does this definition allow you to become the greatest version of yourself?
... Does it make you proud to be a member of this species?
I think it was Emerson that made this observation, in essence…. "We would not worry so much about what other people thought of us if we really knew how seldom they actually did."
Before you go to sleep tonight, create a new definition of yourself, what you want to be and believe, however grand it may seem. Have a human day! Join me, information is Power.
Keep fighting the good fight, with your minds as weapons!
..........................kosmicdebris......................................
The origins of culture jamming probably lie with the Situationist International in France, and its practice of detournement or inversion. The roots of detournement itself probably lie in the Feast of Fools and other medieval ceremonies where the social order was inverted and the authorities paraded around in fools' costume, revealing their "natural" or "divine" authority to be socially created and maintained. Situationist Guy deBord suggested in the 60s that we were living in a "society of the spectacle" - where real leisure and real living had been replaced by pre-packaged experiences and media-created events. Other Situationists practiced detournement as a response: most would take images from advertising, the mass media, or popular culture, and change the dialogue subtly so as to reveal the ideologies masked in everyday media experience.
Writing in the Situationist vein, the French philosopher Baudrillard calls our postmodern existence "hyperreality." Real experiences and things have been replaced with simulacra - copies without an original. Due to the power of mass media advertising, our relationship to the signifier has changed. Now it hides the absence of a signified: conceals the inability to deliver real satisfaction by cleverly simulating it. Part of our hyperreal lives is the fact that our simulations are more real than real. Given a better imitation, people choose it over the real thing; hence Disney's Matterhorn enjoys more visitors than the real one in Switzerland. More insidiously, through various obfuscations, people come to think the simulacrum is the real McCoy, and forget about the historical and physical reality it represents.
Modern advertising critics like Mark Crispin Miller often note the hidden messages concealed within the cool graphics and media saturation of Madison Avenue and MTV. Originally, they suggest, advertising often connected the product being sold with some sort of self-image or way of life (pastoral, pleasant, family-oriented.) Often, it was conveyed that the product would somehow confer various advantages - popularity, sexiness, fame, success, power, even individuality. Today, ads are filled with a strange sort of rugged selfishness, misanthropy, and mean-spiritedness ("touch my doritos and die.") A person is told sternly to buy as much as they can of the product but never to share with friends. "Get your own," they're told.
While various moral crusaders seek to combat the various sexual innuendos of TV programming, they rarely challenge the more subtle but socially disruptive images found in commercials and other advertising.
The product, no longer able to offer satisfaction on its own ground ("a potato chip is a chip is a chip"), instead offers the consumer a chance to be part of a certain 'crowd' or 'scene.' They belong to a cool "product tribe," revelling in the image and sensibility that the product somehow mystically confers - the fetishism of commodities, hyperaccelerated for Generation X. Analysts of postindustrial America suggest this is the secret hidden within these advertising campaigns - that more and more people are being sold style, image, and celebrity, since there is no substance or material satisfaction to the product-in-itself. Concealed within the jump-cut flash of postmodern advertising is a simple code: consumption is a mode of transcendence, a way to take part in something larger than yourself, "the Pepsi Generation."
Corporations utilize various techniques to carve Americans into various market profiles - not based on what products they use, but on what media messages they respond to. In other words, they are to be sold on the images they want to project to themselves and others, and not on the intrinsic usefulness of consumer items. Whatever values they supposedly respond to, are translated into clever pitches, suggesting that the product somehow represents or embodies those values. Subliminal seduction has never been that important in advertising, despite the hype, but the use of semiotic strategies certainly has. Products are often "pitched" to specific ethnic groups, minorities, or subcultures, often using the Marcusian co-optation strategy of appealing to their own sense of difference or deviance. ("Wear our clothes, and then you'll be a real rebel.")
Is there a way out of hyperreality and the society of the spectacle? Yes.

You can take charge of your mental environment, and become a culture jammer. Culture jamming means semiotic jujitsu - using media power against itself. The Adbusters' Media Foundation does this all the time with famous spoofs of the Absolut Vodka ads ("Absolut death," etc.) Other culture jammers often take commercials or TV programs and replace the dialogue and soundtrack with something subversive. Yet others take to billboards or road signs and cleverly rearrange the letters to say something different. As one activist suggests, "where critique is no longer a possibility, parody is always an alternative response."

In our global media village of multinational media conglomerates and satellite TV, culture jamming is necessarily a global enterprise. As the Western consumerist message increasingly spreads to the masses of the Third World/Periphery, it is the task of culture jammers to go there too and jam the signal. Surely, some have remarked, we must be living in hyperreality when Taco Bell opens in Mexico City and Pizza Hut opens in Rome. Or when more schoolchildren know Joe Camel better than they can recognize the current president. Slowly, the lines between information and entertainment are being blurred, producing a fuzzy sort of "infotainment" in which real facts are irrelevant but audience ratings are key.

Culture jamming is more than just a clever game. In an era in which conspicuous consumption is slowly eating up the entire planet, it may just be the key to survival itself. We may not be able to stop the signal at its source, but at least we can jam its reception. The point is to awaken people to their media-controlled life, to stop and notice the signal and noise that is their mental environment. Like "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in They Live we may suddenly notice a host of things we previously ignored.

Messages from all around us telling is to sleep, procreate, consume, but not to question. Culture jamming shows these hidden Barthian 'mythologies' - through satire, it forces people to confront that which seems most 'natural' to them. Today, more than ever, culture jamming is the key weapon in the 2000's information 'war,' the outcome of which could well determine our collective fate.





As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascinations.When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.... Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Listen to your conscience insted of the news, the news and the truth are not the same thing.
Keep fighting the good fight, with your minds as weapons!
......................................kosmicdebris...................................
Treat the earth well.
It was not given to you by your parents,
it was loaned to you by your children.
We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors,
we borrow it from our Children.

Click on the above for the whole 20 minutes or below for a preview.
My thoughts for 2008.……my grandfather made certain that my father's tomorrows were better than his yesterdays, he left the world knowing that his sons would never face the hardships that he himself faced. He provided a standard of living for his sons that was above where he came from. My father also did the same for me, my life was easier and my standard of living was higher than that of my fathers. Both left me a legacy to pass on to my sons a better future than that of my past.
My generation is in charge now, today we, my peers, hold all of the powerful leadership positions in government, education, business and religion. I cannot honestly make the same promise to my children that my father and grandfathers did to their children. If current attitudes prevail the hope for the future will only be concerned with having a future at all, not the hope that our offspring will flourish and prosper, but have the tools necessary to survive a very uncertain tomorrow.
Mankind's trials today differ from those of the past in that the problem is reaching critical mass in many areas no man has ever faced before. By that I mean, poverty and not just in terms of natural resources and overpopulation, but spiritual poverty. Our humanity is being educated out of us and our children's minds are being transformed into nothing more than mental hard-drive data dumps. Nothing less than soulless mechanical clones that race towards death and others that only wait, anesthetized by consumerism and the mass media's allure, for death to overtake their clueless hollow shells.
Its my fault, like John Lennon said, "life is what happened when I was busy making other plans." I cannot change unless I own my mistakes and admit I have a problem, neither can the world. When I have felt wounded by my brothers or the world and society retaliates, all I have to do is look honestly in hindsight to realize that I made a decision, based on self, that put me in a position to be hurt. This kind of selfishness is killing the world. If the world shakes and bakes, I helped, either by my silence or my egocentric motives. It will also heal with my help, too.
I don't have to be an environmental scientist to see what is happening or a prophet to know what is going to happen next. Denial and ignorance is the fuel that feeds the apathetic fire of our own self-immolation in the name of selfish greed. The Devine spark of our eternal light is being extinguished by our own willful indifferent hands.
Science and technology will never solve the lack of ethical and moral values problems we have today, our educational and religious institutions have failed to teach us these things that we really need to know to survive. "You say that you ask only for the Truth and yet you speak like a narrow and ignorant fanatic who refuses to believe in anything but the religion in which he was born. All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth."
Starting today, we as a society have to redefine what it means to be human. How often do you say or hear other people say "Well, we're human.." or "That's just what people do." as justification for certain behaviors? Do you ever question such comments?
Today is a day to evaluate and, perhaps, readjust your personal definition of being human.
You are an amazing creature. You can be whatever you want to be. The only things that can stop you are your own beliefs about yourself and that is not intended in a corny, self-help sort of way.
For example, you may have heard the claim that we are not meant to be with one person for our entire lives and it's not logical to expect someone to be faithful forever. That is their belief and their choice. And yet, there are those who do fall in love once and make it last a lifetime. That is their belief and their choice.
You may have heard someone justify another's violent outburst by claiming, "They're human. Anyone would be angry in that situation." And yet, there are those who are able to remain peaceful and in control of themselves at all times.
Are those people not human? Of course they are! But they have a different perception of what it means to be human.
Challenge your definition of humanity today.
... Does this definition allow you to become the greatest version of yourself?
... Does it make you proud to be a member of this species?
I think it was Emerson that made this observation, in essence…. "We would not worry so much about what other people thought of us if we really knew how seldom they actually did."
Before you go to sleep tonight, create a new definition of yourself, what you want to be and believe, however grand it may seem. Have a human day! Join me, information is Power.
Keep fighting the good fight, with your minds as weapons!
..........................kosmicdebris......................................
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