Technology Change n. 2!

TECHNOLOGY CHANGE N.2

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.

Culture Jamming

Culture Jamming

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”.

LINK TO THE MANIFESTO OF THE CULTURE JAMMERS:http://www.evolutionzone.com/kulturezone/futurec/culture.jammers.manifesto

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?