1
McEachern
In the digital age of today’s twenty-first century it is readily apparent that there is an over-crowding of public space, a constant bombardment of media content projected towards the public, and a mass endorsement of the ideals of commodification and consumer culture. Although several opposing messages are produced every day with the intent of forming diverse views and opinion, they are often in the form of alternative media and resultantly do not have a powerful voice or much influence on society. However, there is still hope for such a resistance movement in the form of culture jamming. Culture jamming is a type of “semiological guerrilla warfare” which entices readers of the message to have a “residual freedom: the freedom to read [the message] a different way.”[1] The intent of culture jams is to encourage viewers to open themselves up to varying interpretations of messages and as a result direct “the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy.”[2]
The area I choose to infiltrate through my jams is the commodification of children’s culture and in particular within the children’s leisure activities of Pokémon, pogs, and sports trading cards. In recent decades, the territory of children’s leisure has evolved from an innocent time of play and fun “into a highly contested, morally loaded social arena.”[3] The game structures involved in Pokémon, pogs, and sports trading cards are no exception. Although all three revolve on the intuitive playing with or simply admiring the cards or pogs acquired; they all also encourage the attainment and accumulation of more and rarer objects which directly translates into a greater monetary value. Such ideology is evidence of “an emergent ethos in the commercial construction of childhood in that they privilege the realization of economic exchange value as the goal or point of collecting the card, owning the toy, or playing the game.”[4] Thus the objective of playing Pokémon; playing pogs; and collecting sports cards is no longer merely to play the game or collect the cards, it is the realization the highest profit possible.
To demonstrate the potential harmful effects of these activities I attempted to produce mock ads and products that illustrate the most extreme results they may produce. The first culture jam I’ve created is of concern to the Pokémon craze that is apparent in many schoolyards across the world. The image of activity on a trading floor of a fantasized “Pokémon Stock Exchange” exemplifies the values the card game employs on its young participants. “For many children, the point of the cards is to chase after the rare, monetarily values ones” which directly correlates with the objective of trading on the stock market.[5] My target audience of this image is children aged 4 to 15 who play the Pokémon game as well as parents of children within this age range. The intent of the jam is to shock viewers into a realization that the values embedded in Pokémon are horrifyingly similar to the ones idealized on the stock exchange.
The second culture jam I’ve produced is intended to produce as comparable result as the Pokémon jam however in regard to the children’s game of pogs. The game of pogs promotes similar values as the Pokémon game in its focus of attaining the most pogs as possible in an encouragement of values of “self interest, chicanery, and the elevation of the monetary over the personal or social” values.[6] This image attempts to mock an Alcoholics Anonymous advertisement by constructing a “Pogaholics Anonymous” advertisement in similar fashion. The intended audience of this jam is once again children who play the game as well as parents of such children. Its intent is to encourage viewers to re-evaluate the effect pogs may be having on themselves or their children in its extreme example of a child holding a cardboard sign stating he is willing to trade his college fund for more pogs.
The final culture jam I’ve constructed is of concern to the area of sports trading cards. The jam is in the form of a mock cover of a popular magazine which states the monetary value of sports cards. However, this mock cover consists of non-traditional headlines which attempt to illustrate the dangerous effects of children’s trading and collection of sports cards. The intended audience of this culture jam is children aged 8 to 18 and parents of children within this age range. It’s intended to demonstrate to viewers that the practice of collecting and trading hockey cards teaches unmoral and dangerous lessons to the children who do it through the cover’s use of extreme examples of headlines. All three of these cultures jams attempt to address the issue of children’s games pushing potentially harmful ideologies into the minds of young children. Although I admitingly do not know if the messages will be comprehended by my younger target audience, I feel that the jams could have a powerful effect on parents of young children that are involved in such activities.
The messages embedded in culture jams can be extremely powerful, however culture jamming does have its limitations and at times does not prove to be as successful as hoped. In the jams I produced one of the intended audiences is children that actively play with pogs, Pokémon cards, sports cards, which I would suggest to be around the ages of four to fifteen. The difficulty I had when constructing the culture jams was to make them simple and understandable enough that a child within that age range would be able to comprehend my intended message. This struggle frequently appears in the manufacture of culture jams as frequently viewers fail to interpret the intended message that the producer created the culture jam with.
Another weakness of culture jamming is outline in Heath and Potter’s “The Rebel Sell”. They suggest that although consumer culture acts like popular culture by following specific trends and fads; “it is rebellion, not conformity, that has for decades been the driving force of the marketplace.”[7] They feel that consumers possess the desire to individualism themselves in a distinction away from the norm and that culture jamming’s rebellious nature simply adds fuel to this fire. Culture jamming is instinctively different from mainstream media and advertising and it is this difference that Heath and Potter argue encourages consumers to purchase products from the companies individuals may be jamming against. Thus culture jamming does not produce the intended effect of having consumers completely boycott a product or question their consumerist ideology but it has the exact opposite effect of encouraging viewers to consume.
A final area I feel culture jamming has a weakness in is it’s attempt to gain attention in the already over-crowded forum of the public space and sphere. Throughout media we are constantly bombarded by advertising and other messages in our public and private spaces. As a result of this relentless projection of media I feel many people ‘tune-out’ the content that is being thwarted at them because it is simply too much information for them to handle. By ‘tuning out’ I am referring to a failure to actively engage in the content you may be viewing and constructing an interpretation of your own. Thus when people tune-out they are not only avoiding the advertising or propaganda messages being projected at them, they also do not receive the messages of culture jams they could be viewing.
Works Cited
Cook, D. (2001). “Exchange Value as Pedagogy in Children’s Leisure: Moral Panics in Children’s Culture at Centruy’s End”. Leisure Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 23(2), 81-98.
Derry, M. (1993). “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs.”
Heath, J. & Potter, A. (2004). The Rebel Sell. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
[1] Derry, 4, 1993
[2] Derry, 5, 1993
[3] Cook, 81, 2001
[4] Cook, 82, 2001
[5] Cook, 92, 2001
[6] Cook, 94, 2001
[7] Heath & Potter, 99, 2004