One
of the motivations behind technological innovation is the hope that someday we
might be able to overcome all human limitations. Among
those, the two that have instigated more discussion are the limits of time and
space. As digital technology and social media continue to advance, the
human dream of transcending time and space seems to become less and less a
utopia. Technologies that allow us to communicate across the world, to move
faster and more comfortably, and to be in multiple places at once without
having to be physically present, are praised by many for their ability to make
life more “convenient”. Indeed, greater interconnectivity and the chance to
“dovetail” trying tasks to technology can and should be considered positive
outcomes of technological developments. However, praising the benefits that
technology doubtlessly can have, should not lead us to glorify new devices
failing to take into consideration other implications of “progress” such as: convenience
for whom? And convenience to what extent?
In
many cases, technologies are built to favor elites; they meet the “needs” of
profitable consumers and, thus, represent a convenience only to those that can
afford it.They can contribute to the
creation of an even greater gap in the standard of life between the wealthy and
the poor. Moreover, as Slack and Wise argue, our world has evolved in so many
ways that those that used to be wants have often become cultural necessities.
What happens to those that cannot afford to buy those cultural necessities? As
the authors of the book Culture = Technology
emphasize, the problem now seems to be that “to be
a fully functioning adult member of the culture, you are likely to have
accepted as necessities various technologies and technological practices that
are not biological, but are rather cultural necessities.” In fact,
shifts in society and cultural changes have made the line between needs and
wants even more blurred. There are many technologies we end up needing in our
culture, cars being just one of them. The problem is, not all can afford these
new technologies, and those that cannot, end up missing out on many
opportunities. As our culture evolves, new cultural needs arise, and so do more inequalities.
Another
issue concerning convenience is that while technology can make certain things
easier, cheaper, and faster, there is always a loss, often ignored in the
process. To name one: what about the satisfaction that comes from doing things
the hard way? If things are too easy, they become sullen. Slack and Wise argue
“convenience offers the ultimate quick fix that is doomed to leave us needing
yet another”. Indeed, while technology does make us more productive, it also
makes us more dissatisfied.
The
lesson I learned reading this chapter of the book is that convenience always
comes with a price.
My
question is, how much is convenience worth? What are we willing to give up for
it?
What happens when a
modern teenager is left without technological devices? He feels lost and disoriented.
Granted that this would not happen only to teenage boys but also to parents,
girls and many others, the issue becomes a little scary. I remember reading in
a book that this feeling of not belonging is the proof that we live in a
generation that is so dependent on technology, that a detachment from it is
utterly unthinkable.Are we really that
dependent on technology? The diary I have been keeping (read previous post) has
shown me that I am way more dependent on it than I thought. Refusing to believe
to have lost control over the technologies I own, I decided that my second
technological change had to be that of surviving one day every week without the
use of my smartphone, my camera, and/or my computer.
Challenge accepted!
I did, indeed, feel
lost without my "beloved" devices. However, I have to admit, I kind of enjoyed it. Not
knowing where I had to be and at what time, no one calling/texting me, no
Facebook notifications to worry about. During the days I spent without
technology, I have felt a strange sense of freedom. I could wonder around following
my instinct instead of the map on my phone and not worry about where they’d
take me.I could read a book for hours
without feeling the urge to check my phone.It sounds silly because obviously I can choose to read or wonder around
without checking my phone even without having to tell my self that for a day I
am not allowed to do so. The strange thing is that with me it is not the case.
If I have my phone next to me, I use it and what is worst is that I don’t even
realize that I am using it. Thus the idea that I too am, as Clark suggests, a
cyborg, a ”human technology symbiont”, is not that shocking after all.
Technology has become a huge part of my life; it has doubtlessly become part of
who I am.
I would like to
share a couple of experiences I have lived without technology:
For one day a week
I got to enjoy the re-birth of my senses. As I walked through the farmer market
on Thursday night, the beauty of the place hit me like it never had before: the
aroma of fresh fruit, the sweet flavor of oranges, the cyan shades of the sky,
the bustle of people walking through the street market. I must have walked the
same street tons of times before, but this was the first time I actually
embraced it all, the colors, the aromas, and the curious variety of people that
populate it. I am not sure if it was for the fact that I did not have a phone
or a camera with me, or simply because I knew that grasping every single detail
was what I was there to do, but I loved it.
The second “adventure”
I would like to talk about was a little more challenging. I decided to do what
years of self-consciousness have always prevented me to: I sat alone at a
little café downtown, drinking coffee and watching pedestrians walking by. I
have to admit that not having the chance to hide behind the screen of my phone
was nerve racking. It took me about 20 minutes to decide I had to leave, and
that I really did not like the way that sitting alone made me feel.This experience was not as successful as I
thought and it made me realize how much I rely on my phone in uncomfortable
situations.
The third
technology free experience I would like to share is my five days long road trip
with two Italian friends. I left SLO behind and with it I left my worries and
my phone. Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Death Valley. Having no
phone was harder than I thought and to be honest, I don’t think we would have
survived if my friends had left their phones at home as I did. Without the help
of a GPS we would have certainly got lost in the desert and with no phone to
call for help, I doubt we would have ever been able to find the right path
again. My mom would have taken the first flight for the States if I hadn’t use
my friends phone to let her know I was ok every once in a while. We would have
never found the closest campground had it not been for them. On the other hand,
I really enjoyed not having a camera or a phone with me. I could admire the
overwhelming beauty of nature without any distraction. I was lucky enough to
experience those beautiful landscapes, for the most part still untouched by
humans: no car noises, no Wi-Fi; just me, my friends and the immensity of
nature.
My plan is to keep
having a technology-free day a week to remind myself that it is ok not to
answer e-mails two minutes after I receive them, that it s ok for my friends
not to receive constant updates on my life, that it is ok to get lost and feel
disoriented, and that is ok to feel uncomfortable once in a while. As Slack and Wise argue new technologies aim at overcoming human limits, time and space in particular. But, maybe, there are some limits that are not
worth being overcome.
I am going to keep
a technology free day to remind myself that every time I am looking at the
screen of my phone instead of embracing life around me, I am missing out on
something that is much more valuable than a FB notification.
How many
advertisements are we exposed to everyday?
According
to an article published recently on the New York Times, an average person
receives over 3000 product-marketing messages everyday. Advertisements and sigs
bombard us from every direction.
The
constant exposure to advertising is affecting our culture significantly. Private media outlets have become a tool in the hands of
advertisers that constantly addresses individuals by promoting consumption as a
way of life and appealing to audience’s emotions. Since mass
communication plays a major role in shaping the way individuals perceive the
world and interact with others, the issue of controlling the texts sent by
media corporations should be one of our major concerns.
Media
executives are forced to ideate commodities that have the potential to attract
profitable audiences, hypothetical consumers. WE ARE THE PRODUCT. In modern
times, marketers’ purpose is that of stimulating our emotional needs rather
than concrete ones. They manage to achieve this goal by selling us identities,
values and a lifestyle as society sees it, rather than the product itself,
which often produces no more than illusory benefits. They purposely attach
products to signs that carry particular emotional values.
EXAMPLE
This advertisement is an example of how brands
attract viewers by appealing to their emotions rather than giving them useful
information about the product. (Apple’s brand
and, consequently, its marketing campaigns, is its key to survival. It is not
being the most innovative phone that makes the iPhone the benchmark smartphone
to which every other is compared, but the power of its branding. People are
emotionally connected with Apple’s products.
The brand has associated
itself over the years with a “cool” lifestyle, the ability to connect with
anyone, everybody, and everywhere, and simplicity.)
Numerous studies have been conducted for what concerns
the way we decode media texts and whether we have an active role in the
communication process or rather, as the Hypodermic Model Theory suggests, media
messages are ”injected” straight into our veins, the veins of an “unresponsive
audience”. Stating that audiences decode media texts sharing the
exact same codes used by media producers and therefore accepting, without questioning,
the preferred reading of the text itself, would mean denying audiences of any
sort of active role in the understanding process of a media text.
Media flak
and other forms of alternative media prove the previous statement wrong.
Culture
Jamming is an attempt of guerrilla media that contests mainstream media with
the purpose of making the voice of audiences become louder than the voice of
the few multimedia-conglomerates that possess the majority of media
commodities.
Culture
Jammers are slowly taking-away corporations’ most powerful tools: the brand,
the logo and the audience’s consensus, contributing to the growth of a sense of
“bad mood” among viewers. By refusing to think of media as a one way flow
of information they hope to awaken those that have fallen victims of marketing
misleading tactics.
HISTORY
Even though actions of
Culture Jamming could be tracked back as far as the 40s, the term itself was only coined in 1983 by
the musical band “Negativland”. Since then, thanks
to the development of high-tech, this movement of activists has rapidly been
growing in size spreading throughout the US, targeting the consumption oriented
media system that constantly feeds audiences with non-existent needs, and
attacking some of the most known commercial brands and their media campaigns.
Through the use of creative strategies,
including but not limited to subvertising, billboard banditry and street art,
Culture Jammers have tried and often succeeded in directing “the public viewer
to a consideration of the original corporate strategy”.
One of the techniques used by the jammers
is spinning and billboard banditry. It consists in modifying, commenting or
simply explaining the hidden part of a campaign, often using graffiti. Banksy
is one of the culture jammers, who uses this technique.
The key to Culture Jamming’s
success lies in its unusual approach to corporate products, a stratagem known
as subvertising. Culture Jammers work with the same tools used by advertisers
to subvert the meaning of a media campaign. They use satire and parody to
destroy corporate advertisements and political campaigns, making viewers aware
of how marketers have managed to trick them. Culture Jammers achieve this by
preserving the original design and the appealing visual layout of the ad but
adding a twist that draws emphasis to the underlying message, thus offering an
oppositional reading of the text.
Examples
Calvin Klein’s marketing campaign
launched in 1985 featured an excessively thin Kate Moss and advertised the company’s
new perfume “Obsession”. Culture Jammers attacked the company’s campaign and their updated version of the ad has travelled worldwide. The
interesting thing is that the spoofed advertisement is not that different for
what concerns its structure and design but the meaning associated with it is
totally altered. The new ad was meant to strike viewers’ opinion, posing as a
counter-ad for all the billboards that are promoters of female sexuality and
that are sadly accepted and normalized by society.
Culture Jammers purposely
create a fresh bond between the dual signifier and signified, offering viewers
a new code to decode media texts, a code that will not allow them to look at an
ad in the same way as they did before. Culture Jammers do not create a new
ideology but just shine a light to expose the closeted skeletons of the media
industry, whose stratagems are usually taken for granted. They deconstruct
corporate campaigns using the same basic rules used by media executives to
attract audiences: creativity, rhetoric and visual appeal.
EXAMPLE
In 1987,
R.J. Reynolds, the manufacturer and founder of the Tobacco Company, Camel,
ideated an innovative advertising strategy that proved to be extremely
effective. Joe Camel became the symbolic character of the tobacco industry; the
“Smooth Character” Reynolds needed to increase cigarette’s sales.
Joe
owned a sporty car with underdressed sexy “chicks” around him; he was always wearing
his fashionable pair of Ray-Bans and, of course, he was never portrayed without
a lighted cigarette in his mouth. Joe Camel was not selling a product; he was
selling a lifestyle.
Joe Chemo, “a camel who wishes he’d never smoked”
appeared for the first time in 1996, in the winter issue of the Adbusters magazine.
Drawing attention on himself in the spoofed advertisement is the same Joe that
9 years before had been chosen as the spokesman for the Tobacco Industry, now
showing signs and changes of smoking all these cigarettes over his lifetime.
The goal of the Joe Chemo anti-advertisement was not to attack the
product itself but to expose the dishonesty of the brand and its failure in
providing audiences objective facts and veracity. The goal of the Joe Chemo
campaign was to fight the unfair practices used by the Camel industry and to
show viewers how easily constructed messages promoted by media industries are, as they
are drawn on broadly shared cultural values.
Is Culture Jamming effective?
Culture Jamming is an attempt to attack the branded system in its entirety,
by seizing the corporation’s brand itself. It is not the individual Culture Jam
that should scare media conglomerates, but the movement in its totality and its
power to raise awareness among viewers. Whether media corporations are ready to
accept it or not, there is a “bad mood” arousing among audiences that are
starting to question the practices and the tactics of these industries. Viewers
are starting to feel overwhelmed by the false promises of advertisements, thus
pressuring marketers to better meet their needs and requests. The relevance of
Culture Jamming lies in the fact that it constantly foments this mood. While it
is appropriate to say that Culture Jamming rarely succeeds in turning an
ad-campaign down alone, it cannot be denied that Culture Jammers are carrying
out a noteworthy job in raising wakefulness and in moving audiences towards a
protest against the branded life.Step
by step, or rather Jam by Jam, these activists are trying to convert easily recognizable
images and signs whose meanings seem to be already constructed, and are calling
attention to the unethical use of these signs that allows corporations to
“forget” to inform audiences about the downsides of their products and
campaigns. Culture Jamming is proof of how big antagonist audiences have become
and represents a hope for alternative media for ulterior support and power to
the detriment of mainstream media. Whereas the modes of protest used by culture jammers are often considered controversial, I still think that the movement needs to be given credit for its creative attempt to challenge articulations of power, and hegemonic ideologies. Culture Jamming, as the Luddism movement and Appropriate Technology, represents a cultural response to the received view.
What
would happen if the voice of the consumer became louder than the voice of the
industries?
