Culture Jamming

Abstract

‘Culture jamming’is defined as‘an organized, social activist effort that aims to counter the bombardment of consumption-oriented messages in the mass media’ (Handelman and Kozinets,2004: n.p.). This article seeks to understand culture jamming from a sociological perspective, situating it in the‘expressivist’tradition, which originates with the mid-18th century thinker Rousseau and whose legacy extends to postwar Western counterculture. Culture jamming is seen as an investigation into the apparatus of representation in late modernity, as it relates to both images and discourses of the media and commodity system, and the expression of political will. By providing an incentive for producers to respond to consumer demands for environmental sustainability and an end to labor exploitation, culture jamming may ironically help rehabilitate the market system it often portends to transcend. This may indeed serve to ameliorate certain‘market failures’ of the global system.