I have picked the topic of culture jamming to share with you. The establishment of culture jamming can be traced since 1980s, it is a form of ironic or subverting mainstream culture by technically challenging the messages that we consumed from commercial advertisements, political promotions and social power discourse. Culture jamming is not limited to power, even individual has the rights to express their views and caught peoples’ attention. As long as the technology rapid development, netizen are easier to publish their pieces on blogs or platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, therefore, the internet has assisted culture jamming expansion and echoes from it. The blog: Culture Jam: Hijacking Mainstream Media (http://ashleighjsmith.wordpress.com/) is a good example, the blogs provided bloggers a platform to post the products of culture jam and explain their intention in detail.
For instance from this poster, we realized it is adopted from the original poster of US Army recruitment, it changed the image into Santa Claus and the slogan “I want you to spend a lot” is explicitly criticizing consumerism and companies over-advertising during Christmas period. These kind of digital activisms arise public notions and reflections, sometime it related or giving supports to face-to-face activisms. For instance, culture jam icons were widely used in the face to face activism – “Buy Nothing Day”. The relationship between them are close, they are both acting as a promotion of each other.
Culture jamming is powerful because it is critiquing the messages behind the advertisements that we are daily encountering. This form of re-production gains bigger echoes from viewers. However, if the readers have not accessed the original advertisements before, the effects of criticism would be decreased.
I think nowadays online platforms have well assisted culture jamming, netizens are able to publish, share or comments on culture jamming pieces. As for the blog I introduced, it is not only posting first-hand culture jam products but also forwarding others’ such as Adbusters. Meanwhile, the format of culture jamming is no longer limited to print or picture, it developed to video and online video platform such as YouTube and Vemo become an excellent platform of sharing.
In Hong Kong, culture jamming are not only based on commercial but also political, the reproducing of HKSAR poster has successfully raising public attention and I certain both of you have seen this icon before. This example has really shown that how culture jamming works and affects us.
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