Culture jamming

Culture Jamming refers to the subversive use of media for ostensibly just purposes. The term 'jamming' is taken from the idea of radio signal jamming, and refers to blocking a message, or replacing one message with another. In this case however, it is not signals but memes — ideas in popular circulation, particularly those produced by advertizing — which are being jammed. The main targets of jamming at the present time are commercialism and globalization.

Because the organizations in question desire good publicity, and have enormous advertizing budgets to spend on it, they maintain a significant degree of control over the media. In order to critique their activities, jamming is used. It ranges from intelligent parody (eg. the WhirledBank site) and creative subversion of commercialized culture (eg. Buy Nothing Day) to more and less illegal activities (eg. Steal Something Day and 'billboard liberation' respectively). In its extreme forms it can be viewed as psychological warfare. The ethics of it are more complex than even those of regular commercial marketing.

Most jamming is driven by moral outrage, perhaps over exploitation of the third world, of women, or of natural resources; perhaps over limitations on civil rights and freedoms. It is based, in its best forms, opon a clearly defined sense of justice. However, in a postmodern world, the negotiability of all moral standards ultimately reduces justice to a power conflict — either you can enforce your concept of justice or you cannot. And if justice is a social construct, it can be socially reconstructed for political purposes through popular media. Thus, for some, this kind of creative subversion is seen as a weapon-of-choice in an emerging information war between libertarian and commercial interests — and anyone else with something to push.

In a similar vein, some modern Christian institutions (Southern Baptists and female TV Evangelists) are the subject of extensive online parodies;  crudely argued on the whole, and very often simply crude, but not without insight.  Consider the Landover Baptist and Betty Bowers websites. The interesting question is, since some of these implicit critiques run directly parallel to some of Jesus’ own denouncements of religious abuses, 'How Would Jesus Jam?' (HWJJ™) — the parables may offer some ideas.