Response Assignment #5
Posted by kscott on February 22, 2007
Find an example of “culture jamming” and bring to class next week (either a copy, original, or accessible via the web). Be prepared to talk about your piece, how it is an example of “culture jamming,” and its relevance to the main issues brought up in your reading for next week.
You are not required to post to the blog this week, but if you would like to receive extra credit, send me your image via email and write about it here (I’ll post the image after you’ve blogged).
** Please note that I added a button on top of this blog for your easy reference to several links that other students have found useful in the past. Please add to those resources, if you find links worth sharing.
March 1st, 2007 at 3:44 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iomlEcaeZgQ
The Caveman Ad’s
Why would one consider these ads culture jamming? The ‘it’s so easy a caveman could do it’ tagline is loaded with cynicism and undertones. This is why I’ve not only chosen this as my example of advertising culture jamming but I would like to use this as my choice for topic in our upcoming paper.
March 1st, 2007 at 4:27 pm
http://www.woostercollective.com/culture_jamming/
Here’s a great site with culture jamming and all around great site for urban/street art.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:06 pm
One example of culture jamming is the ever so clever “Andre the Giant has a posse” street art campaign. It is an original design created by Frank Shepard Fairey in 1986. it is an image of the wrestler as an in-joke to Hip-Hop and the skater subculture.The appeal of the campaign is it’s parody of propoganda, both political and corporate.It is used to mock modern American culture.Fairy mocks the idea of branding by creating his own brand, using advertising techniques to rise Andre the Giant’s image to iconic status.The campaign’s self-description on products is filled with doublespeak(Andre the Giant has a posse-Wikipedia)
March 4th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Manipulation of propaganda:
http://mushroom.nosox.org/b3ta/fisting.jpg
Plus, it is profitable:
http://www.tshirthell.com/hell.shtml
In this pop-culture existence, no icon is safe…
March 6th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
It’s all about the image, ‘wear nike and you’ll be a cool dancer chick’ even though you’ll probably just wear the clothes and sit in front of the tv. putting a fork in the spokes i.e. taking the dreamy coolness away from the ad renders it useless. It’s still advertising nike, just suddenly it’s not so appealing. Plus it can be looked at as an attack on nike, in retaliation to their disregard for worker’s rights in the sweatshops they use and environmentally unfriendly materials. Can we guess what they are pre-occupied with? Probably their insatiable appetite for profit. The craziest part of this is the fact that when I saw this photo originally, I truly thought it was an original nike ad. I thought, ‘wow, they finally went with the mock-culture jam ad’. As if nike was saying, ‘we’re so good, the clothes are so great that nike is pulling you down and you can’t resist the appeal of their designs. I’m still gonna wear my nikes tomorrow, but if I could talk to the 8 year old Vietnamese girl that made them, I’d tell her, ‘you didn’t sow a piece on my right shoe tight enough b/c the thread is starting to come loose.’ I just bought these too.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
I think this ad kind of sums up what lows advertisers will sink to. This is a humorous “culture jam” representation of the new fad of advertising on pregnant women’s protruding bellies. I’ve always thought that fad was a little extreme, that some people were willing to go a little too far to make a buck (or get Super Bowl tickets, whatever the case may be.) I don’t know about anyone else, but I think those type of ads are a little exploitative, although I guess an unborn fetus does not particularly care whether his or her mother is showing them off in such a gaudy way. They will probably care eventually, though, when they are old enough to see their mother’s pictures in newspapers. Perhaps in twenty more years there will be a slough of lawsuits of children whose mothers used them for advertising. I thought the picture of the man was a good counterpoint to this phenomona. Plus, it made me giggle.