Culture jamming the ToI

I first came across the term ‘culture jamming’ when blogger / flickr mate Akshay left this wiki reference as a comment on an earlier post on the Coke controversy

This is the simple wiki definition – Culture jamming is the act of using existing mass media to comment on those very media themselves, using the original medium’s communication method. One of the most significant culture jamming movements is adbusters a magazine, published out of Canada which runs ad spoofs.

I thought of the term again this morning when I read Reuben Abraham’s post on Scrutinizing the Times of India

This is Reuben’s idea – While we recognised the need for India to have a newspaper of record, we came to the conclusion that the time was right to start a blogger-driven Watching the TOI-type blog, simply to catalog the horror that the world’s largest selling English newspaper has become. If enough people contribute, bloggers may even prevail on the TOI to at least lower the amount of garbage they print every day. We could even paraphrase Newshounds’ memorable catchphrase to something like “We read the TOI so you don’t have to.”

Time to start culture jamming on a newspaper – in this case, using not existing ‘mass media’ but blogs as the watchdog medium…

However, the wiki critique of culture jamming also says this – Canadian authors Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in 2004 released a book called The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t be Jammed, criticizing culture jamming as not only ineffective, but encouraging the very consumerism it seeks to quell. – In other words, free publicity for the Times of India. Let us beware of that…

Incidentally, there has been a long history of mediawatch on Indian blogs – one of the earlier popular movements was the Say No to Media Slaughter campaign on blogs like Mahesh Shantaram’s Filter Coffee. And now with more newspapers and therefore more “news” that we have to put up with every morning, I guess it is time to say no again. Maybe just a little louder?