Culture Jamming and Pranking – Christine Harold

In Christine Harold’s “Pranking Rhetoric: Culture Jamming as Media Activism”, she discusses a movement that mocks the marketing tactics of multimillion dollar cooperations and what the media portrays to society. This method is known as culture jamming.

One of the methods of culture jamming that Harold discusses is used to sabotage these cooperations is known as “adbusters”, where these are used to make fun of ads by altering the already existent ad to communicate a completely different message.

Harold’s theory behind culture jamming is described as “an amping up of contradictory rhetorical messages in an effort to engender a qualitative change”, which strives to draw attention to whatever problem is being attacked by criticizers of the media.

Being a female reader of this article, the example that hit me at home was the female image example, and how media portrays to society the wrong idea about being thin. A critic of the media created an adbuster that featured a bulimic girl vomiting over the toilet to portray that this is what the media ia really promoting by advertising unrealistically skinny bodies. This was a pretty strong visual that Harold discussed, and even though it’s being harsh on the media, the media needs to realize their responsibility on the influence of young girls and their bodies.

Later in her article, Harold talks about the act the pranking to provoke the media and get their attention.  This can be valued as another form of culture jamming, but instead involves action to take place to portray that something is wrong, rather then just by altering images.

One powerful pranking example that Harold discusses in her article was organized by the “Barbie Liberation Organization”, where they brought attention to the issue of gender roles.  Originally, Barbie’s voice box sounded like a typical women, but the phrases programmed for her to be said, portrayed her as dumb.  One of the phrases was “Math class is tough”, giving the assumption that the creators of the programmed voice box did not view women as highly intelligent.  On the other hand, the action figure called GI Joe embodied more masculine phrases.  After the “Barbie Liberation Organization” realized these stereotypical gender roles, they decided to buy a bunch of  G.I Joe’s and Barbie’s to switch their voice boxes, to then be returned to the store where they could be bought again by everyday consumers.  Doing this brought attention to the media and sparked massive discussion regarding gender roles, which is exactly what the Barbie Liberation Organization was hoping would happen.