Culture jamming

Culture jamming

The Washington Post ran a media piece about the graffiti that was scrawled along the walls in the subway stations, city buildings, roadsides, and billboards. These graffiti held statements and specific drawings that are very impactful when admiring them up-close. The Washington Post described this graffiti as a form of advertisement.

Culture jamming refers to the practice that is meant to disrupt the nature of people’s everyday life and the observed status quo using art and satirical or comical acts.  The nature of subvertising, just like the graffiti, is a form of culture jamming which relies upon the traditional advertising models, which are meant to target the customers in a setting that is public. This public setting is done for the purpose of reaching as many people as possible through a single means of art.

The advertising industry keeps changing, moving from the ordinary and mass targeted billboards to the individualized spheres of the internet where people can easily engage with the advertisements. This transformation of advertising tactics will affect the future of culture jamming. Advertising companies are now charged by how many people click on an advertisement and not by how many people see it. This enhances the impact the advertisement has on the target audience. Online advertisement has become a new form of culture jamming. This type of advertisement impacts targeted mass activism. However, it can also be misleading because it is difficult to determine whether the number of clicks on an advertisement is the targeted audience.

Racial colorblindness

The Guardian ran a column titled “When you say you do not see race’, you are ignoring racism, not helping to solve it” to show how racism is still a social construct even in recent times. Racism has become an ingrained social construct that most people have formed ways to actually pretend it does not exist. People now pretend that racism does not exist and that they do not see people’s races’.

To pretend that racism does not exist is a form of pretending that the experiences of the people being prejudiced against are irrelevant. People who claim to be colorblind usually feel entitled and superior because they believe that it is a privilege to be colorblind, which to them that means they are not racially prejudiced. However, colorblindness is a form of passive-aggressive racism.

The colorblindness ideology is prevalent, but it is actually a form of racial prejudice even though it does not recognize the apparent ways that racism exists in individuals. When a person claims that they are colorblind, they are merely ignoring racism. This ideology is very popular among the youth. Racial colorblindness is a social value that society assigns to people and their actions on the basis of their physicality. An excellent example of this type of colorblindness is in the skit that Dave Chappelle performed, where Clayton Bigsby, a character played by Dave Chappelle, who is a black blind man that is a white supremacist. An important point that this skit portrayed is that racism is not about the visual but what we perceive.

Rights of immigrants

An important news item that was highlighted by CNN was the fact that many immigrant workers who are undocumented in the United States will not be getting stimulus checks. This news was one of the largest emergency aid deals that the country has ever signed. However, this deal was signed with little regard for the rights of undocumented immigrants. These are the people who came to the country, hoping for a better life.

When the stimulus checks begin to be distributed, the undocumented immigrants will not be receiving theirs since they are considered not eligible for this benefit. Undocumented immigrants do not enjoy the same rights as the host country citizens because they are not considered part of the country. Even if they have been living in the United States for years, the government considers them as people who have broken the law; thus, they should not enjoy the rights their counterparts enjoy.

It is unfortunate, especially in this season of a pandemic, whereby denying undocumented immigrants this right will be putting the health of the entire nation at risk. Undocumented immigrants are the ones who work most casual jobs, which means they are the hardest hit in this kind of environment. Denying them the stimulus checks is akin to telling them that their lives are not as important as the citizens.

Global homogenous culture

BBC once aired a piece on how the Starbucks franchise has grown. The company has been in business, and in less than fifty years, it has been able to grow from a small outlet in Seattle to more than twenty thousand coffee shops in more than sixty countries. These shops serve different types of coffee but of the same quality in similar cups to millions of people from around the world.

This growth of Starbucks is an excellent example of homogenization. This is in regards to the loss of diversity and westernization of the community hosting the Starbucks shop. The shop brings about a new way of serving coffee with similar flavors from western culture. People can now have the same coffee, whether it is in Tokyo, New York, or in Nigeria.

It is effortless to see that homogenization of culture brings about the loss of culture and an increase in westernization. However, it is also important to note that this ideology brings about a sense of global unity. Technology has made it easier for homogenization to occur, which has caused us as a society to evolve in our dispositions by regarding the different members of our society, similar to us despite the different cultures.