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Culture Jamming. Political activism meets cultural production Appropriate the tools and media being used to create dangerous representations in the name of profit, and use them to undermine or subvert the original. Adbusters. One of the original culture jammers:
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Political activism meets cultural production • Appropriate the tools and media being used to create dangerous representations in the name of profit, and use them to undermine or subvert the original
Adbusters • One of the original culture jammers: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIVLjiapEpE
Culture Jamming and Web 2.0 • Take mass media and re-purpose it • We are using the medium to re-imagine the representational message • There are more options
Blogs (feministing, feminist frequency, bitchblog, jammin’ ladies, racialicious) • Youtube channels • Vlogging • Vidding • Re-mixing • Mash-ups • Social media (twitter, facebook, flickr etc…) – see Feminist Hulk’s twitter stream.
Because so many of the web 2.0 tools are open source and open access, this means the message can reach a broader audience • It also means that groups with members all over the world can collaborate
Humour • Video re-mixing often uses humour to get across the point: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpLnPEVl538 (Target Women) • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD0Faha2gow (Feminist Frequency)
Parody • Style of writing/ performing art that uses a medium or form against itself. • Humour is a key component of parody. • In order for parody to work, the original has to be known/ understood.
Class FB page: • http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Media-Culture-Jamming-and-the-Third-Wave/179663805402411?v=wall
Whatever the medium, culture jamming works to expose what has been either glamourized or normalized in the media. • Expose and challenge representations that inform the way we interact with difference, they way we think about politics, ourselves, our relationship to consumer items.
Feminist Frequency: • Anita Sarkeesian curates a collection of videos made by women that comment upon pop culture in various ways: • http://vimeo.com/11855948
“Advertisers counted on women having low self esteem in order to sell more ‘nighttime cellulite cream.” A magazine that encouraged women to use their minds threatened the very promise companies clung to” (97).
ORIENTALISM • discourse through which the colonized “Other” is represented by the West as exotic, inferior, subordinate, sexually permissive, thus providing an intellectual foundation for material domination • (coined by Edward Said in 1978 – in his book called Orientalism)
Questions: • What sorts of representations are normalized? Glamourized? Why are they used to sell products? • How are these women “othered” in the imagery? • How might these normalizations have effects on material life?
If you wanted to create a culture jam project that exposed the normalization of such stereotypes in magazine advertising – what would you do?