Culture Jam Mville-Constructive Criticism

Culture jamming is an effective way of communicating the "other side" of the mainstream messages that are presented to consumers through the leading businesses in popular culture. The notion of culture jamming seemingly grew as response to the commercialization of products and ideas that have been displayed to the public as reality in a heavily media saturated environment. People are exposed to so many ads continuously throughout the day that they cannot consciously avoid every single message but should be aware of what is presented to them. Therefore, ads are created to counteract the effects of the media by those who examine beneath the surface of the messages and a act against the clutter of that popular media outlets set forth. After looking at a few ads and videos online on adbusters.com and other sites, I found that culture jamming was simply turning the table on some of the world's most popular name brands and ideas (eg. Nike, McDonalds, Cigarette Companies, and so forth). It reveals the hidden agendas of well-known companies and the tactics that they use to convince the public of how life should be and how people should act and consume information/products. Culture jamming seeks to challenge the ideas presented to the masses by the dominant forces in the media industry; it reveals the truth behind the pop culture that we take in through imagery, sound, and text. It is a way of sending out a message on the issues that are kept secret. Culture jammers converse their messages to the public by making changes to popular logos (Nike swoosh on Tiger Wood's smile), adding text to certain images (My poster below), creating videos ("The Meatrix"), and so forth as a way to get people thinking about the social reality that they live in. They usually target images in popular culture to grab a viewers attention and educate consumers about the reality of the products they support and the things that happen behind-the-scenes. Culture jamming in essence criticizes the image of the world that corporations have created and taps into an individual's emotion to generate a response to the reality that the public has been persuaded to accept.

A poster that I created to culture jam or simply just criticize an aspect of life at Manhattanville has to do with the Registration process and Student Accounts located at the castle. My criticism stems from personal experiences in having an issue arise during registration for all of my eight semesters at Manhattanville. I feel that the communication between students and certain departments on campus is weak and think that more needs to be done to keep the students informed on their account statuses and their eligibility to register for classes when the appropriate time comes around. Every time that I had to register I would receive notice from either Student Accounts or the Registrar that my account was "on hold" the day of registration. My parents always paid the bills on time, I made sure with my adviser that everything was on point, checked my WebAdivser, campus mail, and still, when the moment came after I waited on line for about an hour to register I received word that I could not sign up for classes because something was wrong with my account. It is very frustrating as a student to not only have to register for classes with those green sheets that have been signed off after chasing down professors but then to wait on line for a long time to hear that you have wasted your time and have to run around campus to student accounts, financial aid, and so forth to have everything fixed. And still, in the end you only did all of that to find out that by the time you can register your classes have been closed. It is basically a wild goose chase and a student is sent from one department to another only to be told information that contradicts because the communication between everyone seemingly got messed up along the way or the letters/message was not delivered to the student on time. Mville claims that it is a community that is engaged in all aspects of their students life but what it seems to be engaged in is cashing in a check and forcing the students to undergo unnecessary stress.


For my poster I used the Mville site logo and a picture of a student walking up the steps to the castle; it states "On route to registration. SORRY!", "Your account is on hold" because this is what I have experienced at Manhattanville and one of the things I have liked least about the college. I hated walking from Brownson to the Castle each time to be told a different story when in reality my account was never supposed to be on hold to begin with! Many of my fellow classmates experienced similar situations and have been frustrated with the whole process. Somehow there was always an error with my account, and better yet, there is another girl with my exact same name on campus whose information was always mixed up with mine. For my entire first semester of sophomore year I had been using the wrong I.D. number because somehow campus safety, admissions, every other department confused the two of us and had us using one another's accounts, so again when registration came around the two of us spent 6hours trying to sort things out and get our classes. In essence, my poster takes a dig at the whole registration process and the departments involved that failed to communicate to me and other students the status of our accounts. (eg. tuition payments, parking payments, and signing loan forms) The whole registration system is currently changing and is supposed to allow to students to register themselves online; that would have been useful from the beginning but I still think it's going to cause major problems during the trial run. I do like a lot of things about Manhattanville but there are many, many aspects of the college that can be improved upon, and I think that they should definitely work on bettering the communication between departments. My poster essentially is intended to make not only students think about the whole process but the administration as a whole so that there will be fewer problems in the future. Mville needs to acknowledge the problems so that they can be fixed and students should be super-aware of their account status and should double and triple check everything before going to register for classes.

On a side note, these are examples of culture jamming against two of the biggest name brands/logos that I liked.
(Tiger Woods with the Nike Swoosh Culture Jam, the logo with it's most popular sponsored athlete. Wood's smile was made to imitate the Nike swoosh which makes his smile look like a crooked and deceiving, as if he were hiding something from the public. Again, using the swoosh as his smile gets people talking and thinking about why someone would have done that. What message would someone communicate by changing his natural smile with a popular sneaker logo?)

McDonald's "Big Mac Attack" revealing the ills of consuming the greasy fast food chain's products.
(adbusters.com) This is interesting because it catches the viewers attention by placing the famous McDonald's M/arch on the monitor representing the patient's heart rate. On the right side you can see the doctor's operating on the patient and shedding light on the fact that McDonalds doesn't necessarily serve the best food for its consumers. Regardless of this ad, people will continue to eat the fast food chain's products but it is funny to note that although many culture jamming ads are creating only a select few members of the population are exposed to it.


This is also a poster that I created from the previous culture jam blog I had completed before realizing that the current one had to involve Mville. I basically added text where "Starbucks" had been written on the logo and changed it to "We're everywhere. Is it fair?" as a response to the thousands of Starbucks that can be found within a few miles of one another (domination of coffee industry) and to touch upon the issue of "fair trade" and how Starbucks can sell it's coffee cups for about $5 and the farmers working the fields in developing countries probably earn about 3cents for their work. The logo can also be changed to say "Starbroke" or something like that to emphasize how much consumers are actually paying for this "premium" coffee and how much they could save by consuming elsewhere but that's just for thought.

Discuss Reactive Measures of Media (Class Activity)

The media has had a strong hold on us not only as consumers but also as individuals for a long time. Since becoming one of the dominant forces in our culture it has been an influential force in conditioning our actions, beliefs, and values. It is important to understand how our role as consumers of the mass media is shaped and the effects that it has on the way we react to events and society as a whole. It is better for a person to understand the effects process of the media and how that causes them to react in their everyday lives to the situations they face, the people they encounter, and the decisions they make so that they become less affected by the false reality portrayed by advertisers. What that means is that it is better for us to be proactive about the media and understand that there are a number of factors contributing to the effects process than to solely be reactive and accept what happens in simple terms (eg. good vs. bad, light vs. dark, right vs. wrong). Both what we see and experience should factor into how we react to the media and the rest of society.

When a person engages in the reactive measure of the media, he/she is simply reacting to the immediate exposure to an image or sound without putting together all of the pieces of the puzzle. Effects are not the results of single occurrences or events. In fact, there are many contributing factors that contribute to the formation of a greater effect that needs to be processed by people on a greater scale. For example, in chapter 6 "Proactive Perspective on Media Effects" by Potter the game of Russian Roulette is used to explain how numerous factors contributed to the death of a young boy who was playing the game with an actual (real life) loaded gun. The initial reaction of the public was to point their fingers at the media and blame the incident on the violence presented by the images shown on the television screen etc. As an effect of being reactive, the individuals failed to realize that the media alone was not responsible for the young boy's death. Other factors such as the loaded gun being present in the household, the unaware parents, and so forth contributed to the tragic occurrence. Yes, the young boy most likely saw the game being played in a movie but that single image cannot endure the blame on its own.

It is a natural reaction for a person to want to point fingers and place the blame on a force (such as the media) that they do not feel responsible for. Once a person understands that there are differences between being proactive and reactive they can act accordingly as a media literate individual. People have an idea embedded in their minds about what is socially acceptable, which provides them with a baseline for handling the effects process of the media. For instance, who put forth the idea that the media alone was responsible for the boy's death? This reaction occurred because with time, the media has become a scapegoat for society's problems; no one wants to take the blame for their own actions so might as well blame the main influencing force. The person that is usually blamed is usually not at fault because their are multiple influences that produced the final outcome.