Dr Peter Milne

You know when you look at an image, photograph, painting, billboard, meme, advertisement and you make that awkward noise that’s half way between a grunt and a giggle because you realise you’ve stumbled across something that’s been altered to challenge the norms of society in a clever yet humorous way? Well fellow citizen journalists, the term ‘Cultural Jamming’ is what you are experiencing.

Dr Milne, The University of Queensland’s photojournalism expert defines cultural jamming as the “engagement with existing media for the purpose of social critique, very often using subversive humour.” In most cases, culture jamming involves inverting/subverting an existing form of media to challenge social norms. So where does all this cultural jamming business begin? How did it come about? Well, like any phenomenon that sweeps the globe, it must have something that people can recognise or relate too. In this instance, it’s iCons. (See what I did there...?)

Way back in the day, icons were a form of religious paintings. These paintings developed shared visual messages that influenced a large audience. This same idea applies to modern times, for example the iPod advertisements (my computer just corrected me when I typed ipod with a lower case p, even the computer recognizes icons...) or even iconic photos, such as the famous Abu Ghraib image. I chose the two examples because the image below demonstrates how once there is an icon, it is open for alteration, ultimately sending out a social statement. 

Here's a few more examples of cultural jamming

As this lesson on cultural jamming was presented to us within a 'media conference' I will reflect on the presentation. This is a bit off topic, but as we are constantly getting reminded by our lecturer, in the media world, appearance is everything. People will judge you by how you look, what your wearing and how you present yourself. I'm going to use a bit of ironic humour here myself; I find it ironic that an expert in visual communication is willing to present a conference about visual communication to public relations students while dressed like an escaped prisoner cross banana in pyjamas. Seriously, could it hurt to tuck your shirt in? 

Anyway, besides lack of dress sense, Dr Milne enlightened me on what the term cultural jamming involved. Although I had previously sat through this exact 'presentation' in a previously completed course, a little bit of a refresher served me well. So, to sum up, cultural jamming; altering existing media in a way that challenges social norms, usually through the use of subversive humour. Hooray!