The following are some examples of the ways in which culture jamming turns commercial messages inside out:
“Tommy Sheep” is a spoof of a Tommy Hilfiger ad, with sheep (presumably representing the conformists who buy such clothing) pictured in front of a huge American flag.
“Absolute on Ice,” spoofing an Absolut vodka ad, depicts the foot of a corpse (presumably someone killed by excessive alcohol consumption) with a toe tag.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) used the Burger King logo with the phrase “Murder King” to raise awareness of animal brutality in the beef industry.
FORCE, a feminist organization, culture jammed Victoria Secret’s “Pink Loves Consent” advertising campaign by using social media to troll the company’s online brand community with the goal of starting a meaningful conversation about sexual consent (Madden et al. 2018).
Brandalism, an activist artist movement, subverted advertisements with art at bus stops during the 2015 United Nations climate conference in Paris to promote environmental sustainability (Lekakis 2017).
These examples show the hidden realities (sickness, death, sexism, environmental problems, and other miseries) and goals (conformist consumers, obscene profits) of corporations. A broader objective is to show viewers the folly of consumer culture, which encourages the consumption of numerous harmful substances (e.g., cigarettes, alcohol) and wasteful goods and services (e.g., expensive clothing). In addition to advertisements, culture jammers create memes to spread ideas and information that challenge the status quo (Lasn 2012). For example, one meme designed by culture jammers depicts a photo of Walmart with the following words: “One of the biggest companies in the world owned by one of the richest families in America . . . holds food drive for needy employees instead of paying them a living wage” (CursedByTheDiceGods 2017).
“Absolut Impotence” is an example of culture jamming intended to counter the alcohol industry’s influence by suggesting that alcohol will negatively impact drinkers’ lives. Is this an effective way to change consumption?
Used with the permission of Adbusters Media Foundation.
Cyberculture
The internet is, as mentioned before, one site for the proliferation of consumer culture and perhaps postconsumer culture. It is also the site of an entirely new culture—cyberculture (F. Turner 2008). That is, the internet as a whole (as well as the individual websites it comprises) has the characteristics of all cultures, including distinctive values and norms.
Some of the distinctive values within cyberculture are openness, knowledge sharing, and access. These values have their roots in the open-source software that emerged before computing became an attractive commercial opportunity. They are also rooted in the knowledge sharing and continuous improvement that were the practice when early computer professionals survived through reciprocity (Bergquist 2003). These roots have been maintained through the open-source movement, through actions against censorship, and through organizations such as the Free Software Foundation and the “copyleft” movement. In line with the values of a postconsumer society, these “cyber-libertarians” favor user control of information and applications and free products (Dahlberg 2010; Himanen 2001). They are in conflict with the more dominant values of profit maximization and control of the internet by large corporations. This conflict of values, a culture war by the definition offered earlier in this chapter, goes a long way toward defining the internet today.
Various norms have also come to be a part of cyberculture. Internet users are not supposed to hack into websites, create and disseminate spam, unleash destructive worms and viruses, maliciously and erroneously edit user-generated sites such as Wikipedia, and so on. Many norms relate to desirable behavior on the internet. For example, creating and editing entries on Wikipedia is supposed to be taken seriously and done to the best of one’s ability. Once an entry exists, the many people who offer additions and deletions are expected to do so in a similar spirit. Those who purposely add erroneous information on Wikipedia will suffer the stern disapproval of other contributors to, and users of, the site. They may even be banned from the site by those who manage it.
There is, of course, much more to the culture of the internet. For example, in addition to a general cyberculture, there are a number of cybercultures that vary from nation to nation. But the point is that cyberculture, like all culture, is emerging and evolving as other changes take place within and around it. The biggest difference between cyberculture and other cultures is that, because the internet is relatively new and the changes in it are so rapid, cyberculture is far more fluid than culture in general.
People need to be socialized in order to learn how to use the internet, and they increasingly interact online rather than face-to-face. In Chapter 4 we turn to a broad discussion of the sociological perspective on socialization and interaction.
Digital Living: Netiquette
Social media websites are developing faster than the norms that can help guide and regulate the behavior of their users (McLaughlin and Vitak 2011). Online etiquette, or netiquette, tends to be implicit—there are few if any formal rules on how to use Snapchat or Instagram. Norms for these sites often emerge when users directly sanction the behavior of each other and content they feel is inappropriate. They may flag a sexually explicit photograph or hide a person from their Facebook feed who posts too many status updates. Our understanding and practice of online norms typically reflect the habits of our close friends, whom we are more likely than acquaintances to confront with norm violations. For example, if our friends are discreet about the photos they post of us, then we will likely reproduce this norm of being considerate when we post photos that include them (McLaughlin and Vitak 2011). Reciprocity, or sharing, is one of the most important norms currently guiding online behavior. Adherence to these norms allows us to build trust and gain access to information.
Netiquette can be complicated, considering the diversity of our online audience—what might be appropriate for our close friends to read or see might not be acceptable to our teachers or bosses. Furthermore, some sites might encourage people to behave in ways online that might not be acceptable in the real world. Snapchat can automatically delete photos, which might encourage users to post inappropriate or unflattering pictures of themselves or their friends. The legality of such practices has become an issue with teenagers when they send sexual images of themselves to each other. In some states this is considered to be the distribution of child pornography. In addition, cyberbullying occurs on a variety of social media sites, such as Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, prompting some people to question whether these digital means of communication are making cruelty more normative. ●
Summary
Culture encompasses the ideas, values, norms, practices, and objects that allow a group of people, or even an entire society, to carry out their collective lives with a minimum of friction. Values are the general, abstract standards defining what a group or society as a whole considers to be good, right, or important. Norms are the rules that guide what people do and how they live. Culture has material and symbolic elements. Material culture encompasses all the objects and technologies that are manifestations of a culture. Symbolic culture, the nonmaterial side of culture, is best represented by language.
We are surrounded by cultural differences. Subcultures include people who may accept much