Culture Jamming it up

In Kalle Lasn’s book Culture Jam he identifies the element of the United States that has led to the current sense of malaise experienced by today’s youth and the nostalgia for an American Dream. Lasn believes that we as American have been unknowingly recruited into a cult of our own making and “set into roles and behavior patterns we did not choose.” We are consumers bound by the constant onslaught of advertisements that drive us to believe that we need to buy, obtain, purchase— for Lasn we have been brainwashed unknowingly and unaware.

Jackson Lears essay, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony” suggest another idea. If Lasn believes Americans are victims to corporations without any fault, the Lears suggests, based on Gramsci’s Prison Notes that perhaps the masses are more aware than we would like to admit. Gramsci suggests a notion of a divided consciousness; brainwashing the masses is not the method in which one gains Hegemony but instead a suppression of certain views of American life are replacing it by allowing “public discourse to make some forms of experience readily available to consciousness while ignoring or suppressing the others.” This is done through mass media or as Lasn puts it the player is the corporation.

Culture Jam gives a brief history of American uprising against corrupt political systems. The Boston Tea Party is the example used to show the American people beginning to understand their own strength when working together. Early American sentiment of corporate power was always held in suspicion. They were kept under close scrutiny of by the state and were very limited in how much action they can actually take; if any violation occurred they were dissolved— corporations were controlled by the people and not the other way around. The Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Supreme Court decision was the pivotal moment that changed this way of corporation governing. After having gained much control and power through the disorder of the civil war, this decision, which deemed that a corporation was a “natural person” under the constitution and therefore had protection under the Bill of Rights allowed for corporations to sit on the throne of power.

Because corporations were not equal to the average citizen in that they had far more money and financial support than any citizen can have alone it created a rift of social and political power that would have serious repercussions for decades to come. Today 42 percent of the worlds wealth is controlled by the top five hundred corporations. Corporations free buy each others stocks and shares. They lobby and bankroll elections. They manage and broadcast airwaves, set our industrial and economic agendas, and grow as big and as powerful as they want. Proving President Lincolns foreshadowing of “An era of corruption in high places [where] wealth is aggregated in a few hands…and the republic is destroyed.”

Mass media is a major tool in controlling America’s flow of information. Corporations control the media and therefore control what we buy, what is popular and where the flow of trends go. The 2001 film Josie and the Pussy Cats pokes fun at mass media and its control on consumer culture. In the film the record label MegaRecords, headed by the trendy and scheming Fiona (Parker Posey) pumps out pop bands and, through an arrangement with the United States government, get teens to buy their records and follow "a new trend every week" by putting subliminal messages under the music. These messages change weekly; “Orange is the new pink!” The Government's motive in the scheme is to help build a robust economy from the "wads of cash" teenagers earn from babysitting and minimum wage jobs. One particular scene features a Goth girl in a record store who goes against the pop-culture trend, doesn’t listen to the music MegaRecords produces and believes it’s all a big corporate scheme— Alan Cummings Character Wyatt Frame immediately calls in for reinforcements and has the girl kidnapped “taken care of” and the threat diminished. This hilarious and exaggerated depiction of mass media’s ability and control may not play-out in reality the same way but Lasn suggests that it comes very close.

If we use the Goth girl in the film to represent subculture and Wyatt to represent corporate power we can understand the workings of how a particular historical bloc becomes hegemonic while subcultures form in resistance. In the film because the media conglomerate MegaRecords was able to control almost every facet of consumerism their ideologies on trends prevailed. They were able to convince mass culture that their products were “cool” by constantly bombarding people with its images and messages embedded within their music and advertisements. They achieved hegemony by covering all grounds economically and developed a “worldview that appealed to a wide range of other groups within the society” their claim being that these particular products, colors, latte’s would serve in the consumers interest because it would make them trendy, cool, popular and stylish— they succeeded in making their products signify the “popular teen”. While the subordinate groups, (the Goths, rebels, emo kids) who sensed the corruption in the scheme did not have the economic power to gain the media control to promote their ideals and therefore it did not become the hegemonic trend. What the film recognized was in order to continue to keep the youth buying the products they needed they too needed to constantly change the fad, change the subliminal messages in their music and keep the youth wanting more. The movie recognizes that hegemony is “a continuous creation” and they did not allow the counterhegemonies to remain a live option.

However if there are counter-hegemonic groups aware of the media manipulation there most be some sort of consciousness in the hegemonized groups that they too are being controlled. Gramsci describes this as a “half-conscious complicity in their own victimization”. As young teenagers with limited amounts of spending money keeping up with the trends becomes costly, however because their ideals have been “muddled by assimilation to a dominant culture”, they still behave against their own interests in order to maintain their status as “cool”.

Lasn explains the movement to end this and make more people aware that they are being duped by corporations. He describes the Culture Jamming movement as a sort of outlet of stopping, interrupting or jamming the messages media sends to its viewers and make them more conscious to take action together to fight against the pollution of information feed via advertisement. Billboard defacing, counter-commercials, and the internet all hold a power that we together can grab hold of and use to our advantage.

At a recent conference geared on Gender I attended a discussion panel on censorship. One of the attendees of the panel Christine Koh, a former Wheaton student and current founder and editor of Boston Mamas.com shared a story. Online marketing at Boston.com set up a Google Adwords campaign such that if a user types “bostonmamas.com” into the search engine, the top sponsored ad that results is for BoMoms. Meaning, they created a campaign to intentionally and duplicitously advertise themselves as “Bostonmamas.com. When Koh cought wind of this scheme she immediately went to the higher-ups of the Boston Globe without response. She took instead took to her blog and announced to her readers of the unjust methods of campaigning the Globe had created to attack her readership. Koh wrote a letter to the Globe and in the spirit of full transparency, this letter was also posted at BostonMamas.com. Her readers took to the web with fierceness and posted comments, tweets, and other blog posts in her defense. After bombarding the web with responses to the Globe’s actions against Koh’s site they removed the link without a word. Koh posted this response to the initiative on her blog:

“I’m incredibly grateful to everyone for their support following last week’s unfortunate dealings with Boston.com online marketing. The subsequent comments, tweets, and posts truly reflected the passion that readers and bloggers have for transparency, as well as the beauty and power of social media.”

Koh’s resistance to Google and the corporate owned Boston Globe proved successful. Her website will remain easily accessible. This example of the “little guy” v. the Big Dog and how together through the channels we do have readily available to us we can help put big business back in its place.

Mark Dery describes Lasn’s Culture Jamming effort and its move to the internet. “Jammers are heartened by the electronic frontiers promise of a new media paradigm— interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist.” Compared to the one way flow of received information from the televisions in our living rooms, the internet provides for two-way communication. One is able to respond to the media on a large scale and disseminate thoughts and ideas but also comment on them rebut them argue them.

“This medium gives us possibility that we can build a world unmediated by authorities and experts. The roles of the reader, writer and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation.”

Even so as experienced by Christine Koh and the attack on Bostonmamas.com, big business will always try and monopolize the spread of information however the internet provides the tools to fight back.

Thinking in regards to the Bubble I can see this website becoming a tool to start the dialogue needed at Wheaton College. On our campus there is currently only one source of information dispersal to the student community, that being the Wheaton Wire. Because this newspaper has a complete monopoly on information and its print form does not allow for an organic flow of conversation it is difficult to refute it or have discussions on its effectiveness and/or its content. How would be able to confront the Wire if the only way to do so is through the Wire? The Bubble strives to break this cycle. By adding the online component to our journalistic efforts it can become a method of activism that defeats the static one-sidedness of the information monopoly.

The current saturation of relatively inexpensive multimedia communication tools hold tremendous potential for destroying the monopoly of ides we have lived in for so long…A personal computer can be configured to act as a publishing house, a broadcast quality TV studio, a professional recording studio, or node in an international bulletin system.

The future of the Bubble is yet to be seen however with the right components and situation on campus it can become a necessary almost inextricable tool for campus information and communication among students. The ability for the Web to create communities is where we hope to bring the Bubble magazine— a “Universe of Technological Communication- patrolled by groups of communication guerillas” can exist and will possibly change the way Wheaton perceives consumerism, media and journalism, the possibilities are perhaps boundless.