Culture Jamming: macro-level criticism of ads, brands and consumer culture

Culture Jamming 101

Whether or not the average Canadian secondary student would be able to define “Culture Jamming,” a somewhat nebulous term believed to have been coined by the audio-collage band Negativland in 1984 (Klein, 2000, 281), it is likely that at least some of these students may have come in contact with various forms of culture jamming at some point. While culture jamming is not without its critics, it does promote a high level of media literacy, which gives it an inherent educational value.

Naomi Klein, the Canadian author of the international bestseller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, describes culture jamming as “the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages,” framing the issue in terms of a reclamation of public space (Klein, 2000, 280-81). Others extrapolate the idea of a general resistance to consumerism, and see culture jamming in less advertising-specific terms and as more of an “act of resisting and re-creating commercial culture in order to transform society” (Milam & Sandlin, 2008, 323). However, the term “jamming” is a reference to the technique of “electronically interfering with broadcast signals for military or political purposes,” and is generally understood to be “the appropriation of brand identity or advertising for subversive, often political intent” (Carducci, 2006, 117).


Klein states that the best culture jams “are not stand-alone ad parodies but interceptions” which “hack into a corporation’s own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended” (Klein, 2000, 281). This “turn-around” then becomes the “perfect tool” to express dissatisfaction with multinational corporations that have dealt unjustly with both consumers and workers (Klein, 284). One example of a “jam” Klein gives is that of taking a “Joe Camel” advertisement and turning it into a “Joe Chemo” advertisement (282). Another example features a thirty-by-ninety-foot Levi’s billboard jammed with the image of Charles Manson’s face over top of it — using Manson because the Levi’s were “assembled by prisoners in China, [and] sold to penal institutions in the Americas” (281).


The Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters is known as a “chronicle” of jamming efforts, and the internet is also a significant tool for culture jammers. Also, the “Culture Jamming Encyclopedia” can be found at Sniggle.net (Carducci, 2006, 117).