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"Growing numbers of observers contend that the dominant public role of our time has shifted from citizen to consumer. Indeed, respondents in polls typically cite entertainment, shopping, and other consumer activities as their top free time preferences. Commercial media and public entertainment venues offer environments carefully constructed to avoid politics and real world problems that might disturb these consumer impulses. As people in global societies increasingly enjoy the freedoms of private life, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate about many broad public concerns. The personalized society enables people to choose individual lifestyles and identities that often lead to disconnection from politics. Many citizens become receptive only to consumer-oriented messages about tax cuts, retirement benefits, or other policies targeted at particular demographic social groups. Culture jamming is an intriguing form of political communication that has emerged in response to the commercial isolation of public life. Practitioners of culture jamming argue that culture, politics, and social values have been bent by saturated commercial environments, from corporate logos on sports facilities, to television content designed solely to deliver targeted audiences to producers and sponsors. Many public issues and social voices are pushed to the margins of society by market values and commercial communication, making it difficult to get the attention of those living in the "walled gardens" of consumerism. Culture jamming presents a variety of interesting communication strategies that play with the branded images and icons of consumer culture to make consumers aware of surrounding problems and diverse cultural experiences that warrant their attention. "

"Nike's web site allows visitors to create custom shoes bearing a word or slogan -- a service Nike trumpets as being about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are. Confronted with Nike's celebration of freedom, I could not help but think of the people in crowded factories who actually build Nike shoes. As a challenge to Nike, I ordered a pair of shoes customized with the word "sweatshop." Nike refused my order. A contentious email exchange ensued which was subsequently distributed widely on the Internet as an email forward. Eventually, news of the dispute was reported in major newspapers, magazines, and on television. You can read a detailed account of "My Nike Media Adventure" in the April 9th issue of The Nation."

"Adbusters magazine and its editor Kalle Lasn have been at the forefront of the global resistance to capitalism exemplified by the Occupy movement. Their new book, Meme Wars: the Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economies, uses startling images to back up its hard-hitting points. Here are a selection of some of the best."

"Lasn, one of the brains behind the Occupy movement, told me recently from his headquarters in Vancouver that he sees a new movement in the making. To many, the revolutionary spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to recede almost as soon as it arrived in late 2011. For two months, huge numbers of protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park in New York City, and in other cities around the world, igniting a debate over income inequality and financial corruption. Yet the movement was widely criticized for being ineffectual and lacking a coherent strategy or message, and seemed to quickly flame out. Lasn disagrees with that analysis."

"Back in July, an idea by Kalle Lasn and his colleagues at Adbusters, a nonprofit magazine run by social activists, had started to come together. For months, Lasn had noticed among his 120,000 readers an unresolved anger that wasn't finding expression. He observed that young people were starting to say they worried about having a "black hole future" ahead of them, and it suddenly felt, he said, "like a Tahrir moment in America was eminently possible." So the Adbusters team tried something out. They put out feelers for a small protest on Wall Street on Sept. 17. They started a hashtag to go with it, the catchy-sounding #OccupyWallStreet. They ran a poster in the magazine to advertise it (see above). And before they knew it, the protests had taken on a life of their own:"

"A preview of what the next wave of anti-corporate activism might look like. Call it Big Dada: speaking noise to power."

"A culture jam uses the media of a dominant culture (corporate, entertainment, political) to criticize and subvert the intentions or values of that culture. Dominant (mainstream, hegemonic, commercial) culture generally aims to seduce and entertain you; culture jams typically want to disrupt or upset you, make you feel uncomfortable about the elements of mainstream or dominant culture that they are subverting. Here is an example. This was done by a student in a previous class as her Creative Remix Project:"

Is this a form of Culture Jamming? "Swastikas appeared last week in Comcast searches on Google. Google fixed the problem on Thursday, but swastikas inserted into Comcast brand images have been a recurring problem for the nation's largest cable-TV company because of a two-year-old anti-Comcast Reddit page that crowdsourced legions of the company's critics to click on an image of the symbol of Nazi Germany with an embedded Comcast logo. Because tens of thousands of people clicked on the image - more than 60,000, according to the Reddit page - the Google algorithm thinks it's popular and returns it in search results."

"How the new graphic iconography of memes, placards and posters is changing the way we communicate and protest"

"The Internet meme is a force to be reckoned with. Whether it takes the form of a dancing cat or a college protest, the Internet meme is capable of changing the world. Until now, the meme has largely been derided as a procrastination tool for slacker college kids, but those very college students are working hard to challenge such unfounded stereotypes. Internet memes can take the form of videos, pictures, hashtags, or even simple words and phrases. Memes have been a part of society for a long time, but their influence has only increased with the rise of the Internet. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr allow users to share all kinds of content. Sometimes, a video or a picture will catch on with a small group of young Internet users. These users, often enrolled in college, recommend the content to others. Once in a while, this will spiral out of control, at which point the content officially reaches meme status. Memes range from silly to spectacular, but all share one thing in common: a remarkable impact on the culture of students in high school and college. The attitudes and behaviors of many students have been shaped by prominent Internet memes. Memes are typically humorous or satirical but there are many examples of more serious Internet memes."

"in recent years, it's taken more effort to distinguish where advertising stops and reality begins. In many ways, ads are reflective of a world attempting to hide its problems from itself. This is true both in the way they portray imperfect products and in their silencing effect on the platforms that shape the way we see things - platforms that rely on ad dollars to survive. The result is a sanitized, "ad-friendly" world, one that conceals injustices and real issues to evoke a false, temporary state of comfort. Is the world we exist in - a world in which products and services are seemingly gifted to us by short, perfect vignettes we might even relate to on some level - the real world? Advertising is present in the vast majority of our media. It's so normal that pointing out problems with ads is sometimes met with annoyance or even argument. On one of my YouTube series, Adversaries, we've received more than a few hostile comments because we're "critiquing something that doesn't even matter, which is kind of a weird thing to get angry about.""