Master of Science thesis
Culture Jamming System
Cultural Activism and Counter–culture Movements’ new communication forms
The practice of culture jamming consists of deconstruction of the media industry texts and images through distortion and détournement techniques that move images from their everyday context to a new semantic one.
The sole ideas that bond the entire spectrum of the culture jamming movement is that free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point that no one can here you. Concentration of media in few hands has moreover devalued the concept of freedom of speech and has introduced the problem of access to media channels.
Culture jamming tries to stir the individual from his position of passive receiver and creating unusual perspectives suggests a more aware and attentive consumption. The idea is to show a public used to the commercial invasion the absurd level it has reached both from the unrestrained consumerism values it communicates and its uncontrolled omnipresence.
The same happens with the cultural sabotage; politicians, corporations, communicators are convinced that to keep the power of media it is necessary to control two moments of the communicative chain: the source and the channel. They believe that in such a way they control the message. But the message it is only an empty form that the receiver will fill with the meanings suggested by the context and the culture in which he lives. So the receiver has one freedom left: read the message in the way he prefers.
Umberto Eco in 1967 writes: "The battle for the survival of man as a responsible being of the Communication Era will not be won at the point where communication starts but there where it arrives. For this reason a guerrilla solution will have to be applied to a strategic solution. If I speak of guerrilla it is because a difficult and paradoxical destiny awaits us: just when the communication systems require one industrialised source and one message for an audience scattered all over the world we will have to be able to imagine complementary communication systems so as to reach each single human group, each single member of the universal audience to discuss the arriving message in the light of the receivers codes confronting them with the senders one. (…) The technology communication universe would then be crossed by guerrilla communication groups that would introduce a critical dimension to a passive reception".
Culture jamming tries to move every single person from his role of passive receiver, and, by creating unusual contexts, it suggests them a consumption which is more conscious and critical.
It shows, to an audience which is already addicted to the advertising invasion, the present level of noise and saturation.
The project of a map to find the way inside the areas dedicated to culture jamming inside the Net.
