Essay On Culture Jamming

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Culture jamming is an established form of activism and serves as a manner in which adbusters speak back to corporate commercial messages. The term “culture jamming” is based on the CB slang word “jamming” in which one disrupts existing transmissions. It usually implies an interruption, a sabotage, hoax, prank, banditry, or blockage of what are seen as the monolithic power structures governing cultural life. (Harold, in press) The culture jam on the Cecil John Rhodes statue, created by Tokolos Stencils challenges hegemonic ideologies that South Africa is now currently living in a ‘rainbow nation’ where minimal inequality exists. Adbusters have argued that streets are public spaces and since there is a vast number of people that lack symbolic capital, they are marginalised and cannot speak back by purchasing their own ads. People should be freed from being bombarded with images that they do not want to see or be exposed to as explained by Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein emphasises, in No…show more content…
Ultimately, these dominant ideas are internalised.Through the use of stencil art, Tokolos Stencils, a South African radical art collective has made use of culture jamming to keep the memory of the 2012 Marikana mine massacre alive. The collective challenges the status quo of inequality in South African society, and aims to motivate ordinary citizens to fight for freedom and justice. In honour of all black UCT students whose land was stolen from their ancestors and whose natural resources were privatised by Cecil John Rhodes, Tokolos reminds us that colonialism and the massacre at Marikana are not only interconnected but part of a long history of dispossession, exploitation and murder of blacks (and especially poor blacks) Therefore, art collectives such as Tokolos Stencils engage with the attention economy to redirect the message being carried

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