Culture Jammings: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

This essay is about the media manipulation that happens in our world today. With technology now running our society it has become simple to distort and alter the truth through these technologies. We can no longer trust what we see or hear through the media’s eyes, we must be constantly judging and questioning what we hear. “Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could argue that the theatricalization of American life is the major cultural transformation of this century.” (Culture Jammings. Gabler, Neal.) This observation of “theatre” is truly there. Just watching the democratic debate this weekend you can see that the whole political campaign is now a popularity contest. When some questions were answered boo’s came out of the crowd, while some candidates received standing ovations. Make-up was not applied in moderation. Wolf Blitzer spits out questions the whole time trying to make the candidates slip-up. It seems that to interest people in their future you must make it entertaining.
The essay also talks about media sabotage. What interested me most about this was the unbiased approach to explaining how to do these things. The author mentions subvertising and its effectiveness, but he also touches on the fact that using subvertising is still using the same method that the companies use.

Dery, Mark. "Culture Jammings: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs." http://www.levity.com/markdery/culturjam.html. 1993.