Letter Reflection to Myself

Dear Alvin,

It seems like it’s been forever since you started this class, but at the same time everything just seemed to flash by over the few months that you immersed yourself in the pursuit of understanding popular culture. You’ve been swayed many times by the words of Kalle Lasn in Culture Jam, you’ve analyzed advertisements, you’ve figured out how you see your win subculture of gamers, and you’ve seen the harm of television on society as an artifact of America’s popular culture. Though the time you spent was long and arduous, it’s an undeniable fact that you discovered and largely fixed many parts of yourself as a writer, particularly concerning your organization in the body and essay as a whole, in addition to adherence to thesis. You’ve also started to see much of the popular culture in a new light, especially concerning corporations and consumer culture, as well as the destructive powers of the media.

Honestly, the first reaction that you had when you read the first chapter of Culture Jam on the first day of class after Etudes opened was: “Is this guy serious?”. Lasn came off so strong in the introductory paragraph and at the time you didn’t know what he was about to tell you. Now that you went back and read it a second time after you finished the book, and he’s finished giving you all that you need to know about the evils of American consumer culture, you think that you’re starting to get a little swayed, even if you think his writing style is too aggressive and abrasive, and his logic is a little bit flawed in some situations.

One of the most shocking parts about the book was, ironically, the pictures of actual culture jamming and ads that were in the book, in particular the ad on the first few pages about “she’s got your eyes”, and on the cover, where the man has a barcode on the back of his neck. Even though you didn’t have much knowledge of what he would eventually be referring to, they played their part in shocking me by the level of bizzarity the images. The culture jamming movement was something that was nearly entirely new to me before you had read Culture Jam. It probably bothers you a bit how effective it was on you, and the fact is that if the information could get out more, it would definitely be able to sway more people. You think back to when one day you woke up and suddenly everyone was cracking jokes about how McDonalds made you ridiculously fat and it was disgusting. As a child you occasionally went there, and although you thought the cheeseburgers were a little unfilling and had too much ketchup in them, you still didn’t think twice. Now it’s nearly impossible for you to even think about picking up a burger from there. It’s amazing how a little bit of sway in popular culture can condition me as a child to grow up inherently hating something. In fact, you never go there anymore as a family, since your siblings and you would always complain. As a result, you’ve also changed our parents. This kind of movement also happened for Nike, and because of this, it makes you wonder how this can be taken to other companies. Also mentioned in Culture Jam, the banning of tobacco ads, actually came as a surprise to you since you grew up after that, thinking that it was common sense that that kind of advertising was illegal. This gets you thinking about whether it would be a good idea to try to use the internet to start Culture Jamming. With your computer and web programming skills and devotion, trying to launch a campaign like that would be a breeze. I think you still aren’t really making up your mind, aren’t you?

And other than how terrible consumer culture is, you also learned about what defines a culture, and you even discovered some things about your own. The funniest thing that you realized at the start of class was that the definition of the word culture itself is something that the entire field of anthropology is unable to agree on. Then as you started thinking about it, you realized that you didn’t even have the ability to pin down your own definition of the word. You tried your best and finally only came to the general consensus that culture had to be able to be passed down. Then you tried to apply your definition of this to a subculture you belonged to: gamers. Although the essay you wrote on this wasn’t the best, it was mainly because you rambled on for too long about something you love. The assignment told you to go do some field research, and oh boy did you do some field research. It’s great when the research is to actually go to LAN parties and play video games until the sun comes up, or go to school and play for a few lunch periods in the only club solely dedicated to playing video games. You realize a lot about yourself and how you belong in the subculture, and how you really began to see how it has helped shaped your identity.

Advertising was something else that you really had to look at. Despite being bombarded with a couple hundred a day without even registering a fraction of them, you didn’t know much about how advertising works. After you started to look at them critically, rather than a consumer, you began to unravel how corporations were really appealing to my subconcious. However, after you changed the subconcious into a concious appeal, you was able to control and analyze them much better. It made you realize why you wanted what you did, and suddenly when you went to the shopping mall to buy new clothes, you started to wonder if you really needed all this. Even though you legitimately needed new clothes since the season was changing and you had outgrown most of your warmer season wear, you started to feel a little guilty when you wanted to buy a somewhat expensive leather coat. You still ended up buying it, except it left a bad taste on your tongue. The advertisements pointing you to it were just glowing with the subconcious appeal of needing prominence. Maybe in the future what you’ve learned in this class will help you be a smarter consumer.

The usual response to reading process that you were used to was to just take what you learned and throw it all on the paper. You didn’t realize that that was just summarizing things and that it didn’t really help you much when it actually came to analyzing the actual text. Though surprisingly simple, you learned to summarize and then respond in the two paragraph format. You probably found that you would end up talking and analyzing for way longer than you would spend on summarizing, which you thought was wrong. Except it’s good for you, and you’ve broken a previously bad trend of yours. Your books also had quite a bit of annotation done in them by previous users, and it prompted you in some occasions to annotate as you read, something you’ve despised with all your heart since your sophomore year of highschool when you didn’t understand what you were doing. Now that you were free to annotate as you liked, you realized it made a lot more sense when you did it in your style rather than some predefined way your teacher made you do it. Overall you’ve definitely gotten better at reading.

Even though you came into this class with a very healthy love for writing, and considerable skill at it for a junior in highschool, you definitely saw growth through your essays. The first essay you wrote was very bland, and it resembled your basic five paragraph, boring highschool essay. There was no variety in it, and you wrote a solid essay, in the most to the book way possible. However, after receiving some feedback, you realized that this wasn’t highschool anymore, and you actually wouldn’t be penalized for not following some super strict outline. Thus you started to experiment with writing much longer and free flowing essays, which unfortunately didn’t end up working as well as you would like. Though you had more liberty to express yourself as a writer and my unique writing style, you ended up not having it as organized as you would like. This would eventually become the bane of your entire English 1A career and it was the single, if not only, that that you tried extremely hard to improve upon. The next essay you wrote in class also followed a more organized pattern of shorter, more concise paragraphs that were easy to chew on. Unfortunately this resulted in you not being able to set aside the best coherent, overarching thesis statement. It had some pacing and development issues and overall you probably feel like you could have done better if you just wrote less and focused more on your thesis. On the next one about advertising, you finally nailed it. Everything came into place and you wrote an amazing introductory paragraph to top it off. Hopefully you managed to pull it off again on the final.

Most of the things that you had to deal with on the paragraph level was quotes. It drove you insane because ever since elementary school, you’ve just never been able to remember where in the world you were supposed to end double quotes. Luckily the handbook helped you out, and also helped you figure out quite a bit about the MLA format that you previously were clueless about. You really started to get in with the program about adding textual reference into your essay to support your points, not just dump information to fill up a bunch of space and make your essay long. It really helped tie in everything, especially when you started to make your paragraphs shorter to improve organization.

The last thing that you really realize as you reflect back on the entire class was how much your writing style was able to be set free. You seriously hate not being able to add your own personal flair into essays, and an analysis of popular culture let you do just that. Being able to throw in personal experiences and still write a strong essay made it really easy for you to be passionate about your topic, and it definitely shows in your essays. The language you used wasn’t the most sophisticated that you’ve done, but the kind of flow, honesty, and relatability that you put into crafting every single sentence was a lot higher than usual. For once, you’d actually want to go back and read your essay, and realize how great it was and what you still have to improve on. Even though you’ve never really gotten a break from writing since you’re a highschool student, you can still safely say that this class has really made you start to enjoy writing again. Maybe you’ll finish up that novella that you started last year.

English 1A is over, and you’ve learned a lot more than you originally thought you would about popular culture and improved bounds as a writer. You’re taking the next quarter off, but you know that as soon as summer rolls around, English 1B is just around the corner.

Sincerely,

Alvin (Yourself)

Culture Jam: What Media Exactly Are We Jamming, and Why?

The TV is dead silent as I type out this essay. I haven’t turned the machine on in weeks, simply because I don’t normally use it, even though my fondest memories as a child was watching cartoons on Cartoon Network. In the later hours of the evening in the quiet suburbia community I live in, not a single car can be heard. The glow of streetlights from outside my window doesn’t exist on my street. At the dinner table a few hours ago, our whole family sat down together to eat, and I had a nice long discussion with my parents and my brother about the current European economy. After the nice, homemade meal, I’ve just finished reading a book, curled up on my couch. The book, Culture Jam, by Kalle Lasn, abrasively argues that our world is coming to an end, unless we somehow stop things like overconsumption, brainwashing by media, commit to a more sustainable lifestyle, and halt corporate power and place it right back in the hands of the people.

Immediately I began to fit the frame of Lasn’s dystopia bound lifestyle over my own, and realized I didn’t draw as much connection as I originally thought I would have. Much of Lasn’s blame for all of these issues is placed on the overbearing power of the media, a new medium for conveying culture that didn’t even exist until modern times. But to what extent of Lasn’s claim does the media truly destroy society, and to lesser significance, what has changed since the time that Lasn himself wrote the book? Our approach to the media should be different than what Lasn wants. Though the negative influences of television definitely exist, the extent to which they may be harmful are not quite as up to par as Lasn argues. In addition, media in general, such as videogames and the internet, have evolved even in the short decade that has passed since Lasn published Culture Jam.

Kalle Lasn, in Culture Jam, believes that all of us as a whole are living in a media and corporation controlled “cult”, and the only way to escape an inevitable failed future is to reform our lifestyle as we know it, by addressing our over consumption, addiction and reliance on media, unsustainable environment choices, and remove or reform corporate power in general. In the first part of Culture Jam, Lasn points out that “our lives and culture are no longer shaped by nature, but by an electronic mass media environment of our own creation” (13). This is caused by mental conditioning through noise, jolts, shock, hype, unreality, erosion of empathy, and information overload, to name a few. Lasn goes on to tell how we are “caught in a media-consumer trance”, and we’ve lost our “authenticity” in life (13). Drawing connections to us being in a cult and highlighting the corporate controlled America, Lasn concludes that our entire global situation, in terms of both economy and the environment, is unsustainable. He finishes with how the American spirit can be reversed and enlightened, and speculates about what life would be like, mentioning the Situationist movement in France and the snow-out of Vancouver. Lasn is particularly strong in pointing out the use of “memes”, or a bit of information that is rapidly transferred between people, to reach his end goals.

Lasn also argues that media has warped our perception on life and desensitized all of us. We’ve been viewing violence and sex so frequently on television that our perceptions have been warped. However, Lasn admits that he doesn’t have any solid evidence that this kind of bombardment is actually warping our sexuality. He also mentions that there isn’t any solid studies that show the amount of violence on TV is increasing, or whether it actually is an issue in correlation to actual violence in real life at all. Even so, after conducting further research, it appears that Lasn could be correct in general about the negative influence of television on our perception of the world. A recent study, “An Intervention for the Negative Influence of Media on Body Esteem” showed conclusive evidence that media had a notable negative impact of women on their body self esteem. Even more surprising was the fact that lowered self esteem was relatively similar between women of varying BMI (body mass index), showing that media affected their view regardless of how they well of they originally thought they were. In my opinion, television, when viewed excessively, is truly detrimental to how we view the world around us. When I was younger, I used to feel sick and disgusted whenever there was an obscene amount of blood in a movie. Now, I barely blink when blood is gushing out from a dissevered arm. This starts to bring up questions about the implications this might have in real life. If someone was brutally injured in front of me, it goes without saying that I’d feel horrified. But have my emotions been dulled by excessive television? The worst part is that something like this is almost impossible to gauge.

In addition, using this kind of bombardment can help advertisers push their products. Two points that Lasn pushes are that advertisers are quick to use fear, such a news story, to make us insecure and then buy products, and the unstoppable force of sex in television. His view is verified in the essay “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals” by Jim Fowles in Common Culture, where Fowles states that in recent times “concern with sex in ads has redoubled” (76). Furthermore, Fowles confirms that all of us have the basic need to feel safe that advertisers exploit. I believe that both Lasn and Fowles are especially correct when it comes to sexual advertising. I can leaf through a magazine all I want and glance over the car commercials without absorbing a single model, but pass over a advertisement for a man covered in scantily clad females telling me to buy Calvin Klein cologne for men, and it’s almost impossible to prevent myself from instinctively stopping over it. It might even be further proof how effective this advertising is if you consider that that ad was in magazine I briefly flipped through while waiting for the dentist, probably almost half a year ago. Media not only warps our mental state, but also manipulates it with its advertising.

It goes without a doubt that the largest artifact of modern culture is the television. However, even with all this scare on how television is horrendous for our well being, I still don’t believe it’s necessary to completely turn off the TV and walk away from it as Lasn is suggesting us all do. As “Television Addiction is No Mere Metaphor” states, “little evidence suggests that adults or children should stop watching TV altogether. The problems come from heavy or prolonged viewing” (151). In daily acts such as doing nothing or daydreaming, heavy viewers were drastically more anxious and less happy. It’s not as if growing up on television created addiction for children, either. Though my parents specifically tried to limit my viewing of TV when I was a kid, I’d always find ways around it. Whenever my parents turned the channel onto PBS I’d switch it to Cartoon Network whenever they were gone. However, as the article mentions, after around four hours, or from 8 to 12 in the morning, which was when the best cartoons would air on the weekends, “the longer people sat in front of the set, the less satisfaction” I would get from it (149). Eventually I’d just get up and go outside to play soccer with my friends, and come back and tear through a huge novel. As I got older, my viewing of television eventually waned out to almost never when I started becoming more and more interested in video games. Even to this day, the most “video” media that I’ll watch in a normal day is about twenty minutes of an online web-series that I follow. Though I’ve stopped watching American television, I still sometimes indulge in huge marathons of Japanese anime, but the most I’ll do is tear through a 12 episode season in a couple hours and be done with it.

But modern media doesn’t just end at the television. Nowadays the computer and the Internet are also entertainment, as well as video games. Although Lasn believes otherwise, there are fundamental differences between television and these two media forms. In addition, Lasn fails to address many aspects of both of these media forms that could be immensely more helpful than television in his approach to “culture jamming”. With an approach to the issues of the modern day world by using these two media forms, we can as a new generation, formulate a better approach than Lasn would.

In the “Posthuman” sub chapter of Culture Jam, Lasn talks about “cyberhangouts called MUDs (Multiple-User Domains), where role-playing fantasy games are always in progress” (44). Lasn explains how they would “interact with other players on a superficial level via artificial-intelligence programs” (44). He goes on to explain how people were trying to create qualities people were trying the develop themselves, and used the MUDs as self inserts to learn from. The days of MUDs are long gone, however, so much so that I’ve never even heard of them before Lasn himself mentioned it. I immediately drew connections, however, to MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), such as Runescape, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars. When I was around ten or so, World of Warcraft became massively popular, and almost all of my friends started to play it. I felt incredibly left out as my computer couldn’t handle it. Most of them started to play for excessive amounts, bordering on four hours a day, some of them even getting up before school to sneak onto the computer and play when their parents weren’t awake. However, as middle school started to roll around and then eventually highschool, the amount of WoW players I knew started to fall like flies. To most of them it wasn’t even a conscious decision: they didn’t have enough time and slowly they played less and one day it just occurred to them that the virtual world just wasn’t that fun anymore. It’s only in the rarer cases where people will fall addict to it, and those shock stories may seem terrifying, but video games are likely an escape method for them, from more serious issues in life.

Outside of MMORPGs, which are generally considered a huge waste of time by most of the gaming community, the will to play games largely comes from “‘flow’ - accompanies increased mastery of most any human endeavor.” However, “kids report feeling tired, dizzy, and nauseated after long sessions” (Kubey and Csikzentmihalyi 153). Fatigue is something that is inherent in video games, as they’re almost always difficult and taxing mentally, and sometimes physically. For example, when playing Starcraft, a single match can last for over half an hour, I usually can’t play more than a couple of matches in a single day even if I wanted to. Though this may sound silly, if you logically think about it, videogames have also have an inherent self-limitation factor on them, especially if they work your mind especially hard.

An unorthodox approach in culture jamming would be to use video games as a platform. However, it’s actually already been done, albeit subtly, by one of the largest video game companies in the entire world. One of the most famous cases is in the game Kirby 64, which I played as a kid. One of the planets, Shiver Star, was a frozen over world, with the vague outline of Earth’s continents. On the planet, you roam through levels of abandoned shopping malls and factories, with no life, and your only enemies being deactivated robots. It was a jarring contrast from the bright colored and lively worlds usually in the game. As I look back on it now, it’s painfully obvious that Shiver Star was a post apocalyptic Earth, wrecked by climate change, and all that was remaining were buildings that represented consumer culture. I loved the game as kid, and the fact that I realized one of my most respected companies had the audacity to put such a bold statement in an internationally released game. This is something that could really influence children and teenagers, and could be incredibly strong if more companies were petitioned to do it.

Finally, Lasn also gravely underestimates the power of the internet to be able to motivate huge amounts of people. In my opinion, “memes” were almost perfectly designed to be spread through the internet. In fact, there are currently uncountable amounts of “internet memes” floating around on the web. Although most of these are purely for entertainment and humour, and are nothing more than inside jokes, a certain viral video exploded last year that many of us saw: Kony 2012. It was a viral advertising campaign designed to stop Kony, a child soldier warlord in Africa. So many people were moved by it that within a few days, pretty much everyone at school had seen it. Thought it fell through the cracks for various reasons, the fact that the message had gotten out to so many people in such a short time was amazing. The reason it succeeded was because it presented a new, rebellious light, in asking young people to run around their city and nearly vandalize property by putting posters up. By combining the fire of rebellion with the ability of technology to spread information, I think that Lasn’s legitimate goals to improve the environment and stop corporate power can be done much better than what he was trying to do. Despite what some recent acts like SOPA tried to do, the internet is still a free place, and websites like YouTube and Google will defend that fact. Rather than fighting on the grounds of a corporate controlled television media, it would be much easier on the level playing field of the internet.

Though Lasn pours quite a bit of blame on the media, especially the main modern cultural artifact, the television, it’s not the main issue in our modern day culture. Lasn however, does realize that in order to fight the greater issues of humanity like an unsustainable environment, over-consumption, and corporate power, that we have to use the media to fight against them. While his idea is good, his approach in using the TV isn’t nearly as effective as using the internet and perhaps even video games to combat the issues at hand. In the end, it seems almost silly that the technology itself is the evil, rather than the messages in the media that we distribute. If we are to ever, as Lasn says, escape the “global pyramid scheme” where “future generations - our children and our children’s children - are the dupes”, we’ll have to do more than just flip the television advertising on them, but also fight on the newly opened second front of the Internet (94).

Rebellion, Gore, and Sex: What’s in a Video Game Advertisment

From the young age of eight, I’d check the mail bin in our garage every Sunday morning for the newest copy of “Game Informer” magazine. I’d slobber all over the beautifully designed cover, just like with the big bowl of cereal I was eating. As I sat down in front of the Gamecube after my breakfast, I’d flip through the magazine during the loading screens: the full two page color advertisements filled with explosions and my favorite characters, the newest and greatest in gaming gear, and revolutionary new game ideas. I was almost as excited at the mere prospect of owning anything and everything that was advertised in the magazine as I was to beating the current level of the game I was playing at the same time. In my later years, the internet rolled along and reading the magazine became somewhat obsolete, but the fact remains that I’ve been bombarded to this day with advertisements about this “new media”: video games. As the majority of video games are targeted toward teenage and young adult males, the advertising seems to be directed in this direction as well. After picking out a random advertisement for a recently released game from a Game Informer magazine, it becomes apparent that my demographic’s apparent motivation to buy these games stem from our strong needs to aggres, dominate, and the extremely powerful appeal of sex.

Something that has received large criticisms since the dawn of 32-bit graphics is the way that women are portrayed in video games. It should come as no surprise to anyone that one of the easiest ways to appeal to young males are to feature main characters that are female, with unrealistically perfect body proportions and scanty attire. The front cover of this GameStop advertisment for the new game Anarchy Reigns spotlights an “exclusive character” that goes by the name of Bayonetta. Though her attire is nowhere near as scandalous as some other characters, she’s dressed in a tight black latex combat suit with high knee boots. On top of that, she’s thin beyond belief and has a gothic, seductive look about her. Indeed, looking at the rating for the game “M” (mature), two of the listed reasons for its categorization is “partial nudity” and “sexual themes”. 
What’s important about this is that the makers of this advertisement decided to put her as the main focus of the entire article. Her frame on the article takes up about over a third of the whole advertisement, and her character model is dead center. As Fowles mentions in his article “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals”, “sexual appeal ... conventionally works better on men than women”. Indeed, immediately the male gaze, including my own, would have been drawn to her, before reading anything else on the whole ad. This kind of sexual-centric advertising for video games appears in a huge amount of ads for video games. In fact, some ads completely cut to the chase and feature near pornographic images of women with the game title over them, with almost absolutely no relation to any game information (Read more: http://tinyurl.com/cx8sadw). By putting a large figure of a seductive women smack in the middle of the advertisement, it’s sure to magnetize your attention to it immediately even if you were simply leafing through the pages of the magazine.

What’s also important to notice is how she is being portrayed. Though she is menacing with her bladed wings and weaponry, and the purpose of her design to make her seem powerful - therefore a useful extra character that would be incentive to pre-order the game - she is still presented sexually. Game companies will find a way to present someone who you’d have never thought about sexually to you sexually. This current advertisement in question is from a small time developer that I’ve never heard of, but it might be shocking even large companies focused on children’s games is not exempt from doing this. Take for example, Nintendo. Everyone knows about how they usually make age-appropriate games for younger kids. However, they somehow managed to progress a franchise like Metroid, featuring a space trooper in power suit who beat up aliens, to a revealing at the end of a game that the trooper was a girl - something that came as a huge surprise to everyone who assumed she was just male because she was in a combat suit and never spoke, to being featured on the cover of a Super Smash Bros game. Here’s the catch, she’s in a skin tight blue bodysuit with long blonde hair and a killer body (http://tinyurl.com/87h3ph30). There’s no stopping it, no matter how reputable a company is. Rampant sexual advertising in video games is far too powerful for an industry based around appealing to young males; there’s simply no better method, albeit somewhat low-handed, for instantly grabbing the attention of potential customers.

The thing that hits you straight after you finish staring at the centerpiece is most likely the overall design choice in the advertisement. For starters, the background is black. The font chosen for all the words is rugged and gives off the feeling of roughness. The yellow text contrasts sharply from the background. And the logo, an ‘A’ imprinted in a circle, looks like it’s was drawn with blood. Everything contrasts sharply with each other, and the in-game screenshots look dark and edgy. The only word that can describe the design of a whole is the feeling you get when you look at it: aggressive. It makes you want to fight. The background of the Bayonetta picture has either black ink or blood splattered on it, somewhat implying that she has just killed or defeated an opponent. You get the impression that she is strong, and you want to play as her character to defeat more enemies. Her stance in the photo is fierce and aggressive. Off to the side, we have more frames of character firing guns or rearing up to throw a punch. It stirs up something inside you that makes you want to revert to your baser instincts and fight. In fact, on the right, the game advertises “2 Exclusive Modes: Dog Fight and Mad Survival”. Notice the word choice, especially with “dog”, “mad”, and “survival”. If you were to simply read each word individually with no context in between them, certainly you’d agree to them being able to evict a savage feeling inside you. Another dead giveaway to this is, once again, the reasons for the maturity rating: “blood and gore” and “intense violence”. However, it’s completely obvious without reading the rating that the advertisement might as well have slapped those two themes in giant text right over the entire page. It’s something that pulls at our subconscious, the way that everything is laid out. As stated by Fowles, the dark and aggressive side of all of us is “existing as harbored energy”. Although in most cases “few manufacturers want their products associated with destructive motives,” video games by no means has to follow that notion. It’s simply a fantasy simulation, and any amount of destructive motives are acted out right inside the game to no harm of anyone else. In fact, videogames are an amazing place to get rid of that sort of “harbored energy”. Though the person standing next to you may cringe as you slice open the throat of your opponent in Anarchy Reigns, you can feel the pent up stress inside of you fading away. The need to aggress is inside all of us, and this advertisement, along with many games, target exactly that.

Though all of us have a certain need to aggress, there is a subsect of aggression that is particularly prominent in young males, especially teenagers. The need to rebel. This is something that is buried into pretty much every teenager’s mentality, especially male. Perhaps it might be because we start gearing up to live like adults, and the feeling that our parents are holding us back. Whatever the reason may be, the need to rebel for teenagers is very real, and is something that can be targeted blatantly by game advertisements. Anarchy Reigns holds no stops when it comes to this: it puts the word “anarchy” straight in the title. Whether or not you’re an expert on the anarchist political ideals, the word is instantly linked with the feeling of rebellion. Rising up and crushing the norms. Upon closer inspection of the advertisement, the art style is very much gothic and dark. Commonly we think of teenagers wearing spiked jackets and collars as being different, or even weird. But to them it’s perfectly clear what they want, and it’s to send the message that “we aren’t like the rest of you”. Along with that mentality means that they’re by definition one of the most rebellious teenage subcultures, and this advertisement fires straight at that. Ingrained into the background as something like a watermark is the large banner “Anarchy Reigns”. Even though this is a video game, and there’s no real revolution going on, those words fire us up and make us feel like we want to get up and do something. In this case, it’s get up and go buy the game.

Gamers are often prideful in how good they are in relativity to their peers. An important thing to note is that this is an advertisement for a pre-order. In theory, pre-ordering a game shouldn’t really make a difference: the prices tend to be the same or even higher than simply buying on release date. However, it helps the company more accurately gauge how much they need to ship out come the week before release. The ad accomplishes this feat by giving out some extra features for pre-ordering, like the character Bayonetta, and the two exclusive game modes. They also point out at the very top in bold, yellow lettering that this was a “pre-order exclusive”. In fact, the word “exclusive” is used in the ad three times alone, tied with the amount “anarchy” is used. They want you to feel that buying this game will make you special, will make your copy of the game stand out from all of your friends. Though this may appeal a bit to our need for attention, due to the nature of videogames, this mainly appeals to our need to dominate. Offering this bonus content implies that these special additions will be an addition to your arsenal and may make you a better gamer. Often game pre-orders are sold with special guns or features that are small, yet not available in a regular copy. Ironically, these extra features are for the most part never very useful, and some are purely cosmetic. Even so, gamers will gobble up this opportunity to gain an edge over their peers, especially if the pre-release price is pretty much the same as the release price. Not only do we aggres, we also strive to beat everyone.
 
In truth, I have never even heard of this game Anarchy Reigns before this, and happened to stumble upon the ad online, randomly. However, after staring at it for this long, and unraveling the appeals, I realized that had I saw this ad earlier I probably would have ended up pre-ordering the game. The way this is set up appeals perfectly to my young and male demographic, and through the use of appeal of sex, rebellion, aggression, and sex, it has been effective in grabbing my attention and curiosity. Ironically, by the time I had waded through all that persuasion, I made it to the tiny icons at the bottom and realized they only had it for Xbox 360 and PS3, while I play on PC. Had that not been the case, this example of well constructed advertisement would have surely led me to buy this game.

Undeniable Advancement: Technology

Some fifty years ago, people thought imagined fantasies of flying cars and explorations into the furthest depths of outer space by the time the turn of the millennium came around. In those fifty years, it's undeniable that we've developed, except instead of colonizing the universe, we've developed "convenient" gadgets like the "smartphone", and immersed ourselves into virtual media like the television and the computer.  Is the theme of technology that we are currently developing really the direction that inventors of the past have dreamed of? Loss of the values of our very own wisdom and logic through the institutions of writing and numbers, and modern day disconnection from the real word by virtual fantasies seem to cast technology in a negative light. But still, there are ignorant people on both sides, and the fact that the human race seeks progression. In the end, we must realize that these changes are, as a whole, neither good nor evil, they strike out to a delicate equilibrium.

Technology has led to an overall change in how our brains work, and how we treat the world around us. In Plato's Phaedrus, about the King Thamus and his judgment upon various inventions, Thamus mentions at one point about the invention of writing, "Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on it … is a receipt for recollection, not memory" (CC, 364). At first this seems to be a ridiculous notion: how could something so integral to human development be a vice in Thamus' eyes? It wouldn't even be possible to read this if not for the invention of writing. However, Thamus continues, "they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction … very knowledgeable when they are … quite ignorant." (CC, 364) When applied to the modern classroom, Thamus' statement begins to seem quite applicable. Many social studies teachers simply cram students into reading and note-taking on page after page of text. They read, and they write. When they have completed their courses, myself included, they are knowledgeable about fact and detail after detail that they has been rigorously drilled into their heads from their countless hours of interaction with text. But in the end, after the final tests are all said and done, many of us simply forget what we have learned. If we must indeed review history, the first thing we do is revert back to our notes. Most of us are unable to name the year the Magna Carta was signed off the top of our heads, even though we were able to name it in a heartbeat if we were asked back in seventh grade. It could be said that something as basic as writing has become a crutch.

            Though something as simple as writing was able to completely redefine how we valued our education, something even simpler has drastically changed the weight we put on wisdom and knowledge. Even though the "number" was originally meant for use with math, as the article "The Judgment of Thamus" states, "the first instance of grading … occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of … William Farish." When put this way, as the Judgment of Thamus also mentions, it sounds almost ridiculous to assign a quantitative value to something that we hold so highly: human thought and intelligence. Indeed to scholars who lived in the Golden Age of Rome or the Cosmopolitan Era of the Middle East, such a concept would have come off as absurd. Even so, in the modern day we go as far as to rank someone's entire intelligence as a whole by means of IQ points. The invention of numbers has led us to see everything as a number. Someone living in the modern day would never be able to imagine what life was like before the invention of numbers. We've become engulfed in this craze to quantify.

            Even with harsh criticism on something as basic as writing and numbers, it would be outright mad to deny that we could be living lives as we are right now without either. Without writing and numbers, none of us would have ever read a book, none of us would have been able to receive such knowledge about the world as we have right now, none of us would have any ability to buy anything, and we probably wouldn't have computers. Or at least we wouldn't be able to the way that we would normally expect. Technology is simply the means to an end. Who knows what our bustling human minds could have come up with to spread information around the globe without writing, or to do menial computations for us? This leads me to an important point about technology, also mentioned in "The Judgment of Thamus": when a new technology is produced, it doesn't merely change one aspect of life. Like biologists would treat an ecosystem, or theoretical physicists would treat the butterfly effect and parallel world lines, the introduction of a new technology changes everything. It wipes the common lifestyle of every human and rewrites it, so subtly that we don't notice it. This is where my view diverges from the article. While I believe that technology has made many negative changes to what could have been a promising human future, I stand firm that technology has shaped us into what we are now, and delaying technological advance would have only led to the eventual workaround by us as a human race

            Though I have faith in the human race to make correct decisions, as we have in the past with writing and numbers, modern technology is progressing at a rate that we have never seen in history before. As a result, there are certainly some seemingly negative side effects of this, detailed in Kalle Lasn's Culture Jam.  Lasn strikes especially firmly on how we are falling into a virtual existence where people are unwilling to deal with their real life and every day problems. Indeed, much of Culture Jam's "Autumn" chapter is about how modern technology is causing people to escape into pixelated fantasies and becoming disconnected from the real world. He tells an anecdote about one girl obsessed with online chatrooms: "Sometimes I go out,' she'd say, but she didn't mean 'out' out, she meant 'out' of that chat group and into another site." Lasn mentions another group of people who lose themselves in multiple online identities, especially in video games where you can be immersed into a virtual environment. He wraps up with some harsh questions about whether these virtual identities were really who you were, and asked us to re-evaluate how much technology was influencing the person that we were. Lasn makes some good points. I too have some friends that are obsessed with online gaming and sacrifice their success in school to do well in their virtual personas. Some of them even spend money on pure cosmetic items, eerily similar to how a person would buy clothes in the real world. All set aside, as an avid video game player myself, I do the same, to a milder extent. There are days during the holidays when I can lose myself in a role-playing game for over 12 hours in almost one continuous sitting. In fact, a common feature that gamers look for in video games is "immersion". We throw the term around like it's confetti: this "breaks immersion" and that "enhances immersion". We have game modifications that specifically target voices, sound effects, or even the removal of the heads-up display system, all for the sake of "realism". Technology has developed to the point that some of us strive to be sucked into the virtual world as deep as possible. Indeed, we're throwing money to lose ourselves as deep in the fantasy as we can.

            Still, I find Lasn's commentary leaning on the side of ignorant and overly harsh. His aggressive style of writing subtracts my focus on his actual speaking points. When he quotes the girl about her online chatroom "addiction", it almost seems as if he's somebody who hasn't tried it for himself and is misquoting and twisting words. He doesn't give any context for what she was saying before the quote. This brings up another important point about my personal views on technology: there are too many ignorant people on both sides. While I've already discussed how people are choosing to indulge themselves in the "fantasies" that Lasn considers a "vice" of technology - not limited to just video games but television as well - there are also people like Lasn who are unable to see the stance of the other side. He questions how people are being shaped by technology, and not by their personal "soul", or whatever he was trying to get at. What defines a human anyways? Experiences? Though this may be delving into too far of a radical approach to thinking, it is often acceptable to say "you have to read this book: it's sure changed my life." You could say the same about a college course, or maybe even a movie. Maybe the movie would be pushing it on Lasn's terms, but for even some as radical as him, something like that wouldn't be considered an "evil".  To the King Thamus however, something like that would be an abomination. He'd claim that it would be ridiculous to have some kind of "technology" like writing change someone's entire life. To the scholars of the Golden Age, a graded class changing someone's life would have around the same effect. Except over the course of time, albeit 2000 years, we've come to completely change our views. Who is it then, like Lasn, to tell us that video games or television should be any different? Especially when technologies like writing have come to be one the most influential parts in human advancement, why can't playing video games be a "wholesome activity". I know for myself, I've played video games that have changed how I see the world. As seen by Lasn's statements, it is a hazardous way of thinking to begin to imply that modern day technologies are any less valid in shaping an individual than preexisting, ancient technologies.

            A final article, called "Breaking Down Borders" by Robert Samuels, tells a short story about how a café in the Borders store has changed from technology. The final paragraph sets out the most important point: "Is there anything really wrong with that? We adapt to our new technologies, in fact, by using more technologies. There seems to be now way of escaping from a technologically mediated environment … but … we seem to be coping well enough." Samuels holds a stance that is neither leaning very far for or against technology. Instead, the author seems to hold a very neutral ground, in fact, more along the lines of "acceptance".  At the end his point seems to be very relaxed, almost implying that this will be the natural order of things and that there isn't anything particularly wrong about that. Whether we resist it or embrace it, we've always moved forward, generation by generation. It would be silly to argue that we are better or worse off with new technology. For as long as history has gone on, there have always been those who opposed change, yet we still barge through and create the wonders that we could have never imagined just one generation before. We live in the time that we do now, not before, and not after. If we are content with our technology, then who is to say that we aren't?

            Even with the jarring negatives of the crutches of writing, how numbers have reshaped our perceptive of the world, and how virtual life is taking over, it's important to realize that humanity has always seeked progression, and how this argument is time old and has always included a myriad of opinions, many being very ignorant of the other side. It's important to realize that technology to the human race is neither the greatest good, nor evil. It's a delicate balance between the two, and in this balance we find something far more important. Change, and undeniable advancement.

The Subculture of Gamers

The smashing of keys and the frantic clicking can be heard from the room. Digitalized voices blare out of speakers, in response to the the comments being shouted into the microphone. Two to three hours later, the same flurry of sound can still be clearly heard in the room over. If you have lived with a gamer, a scene like this is typical. But what exactly is the modern day "gamer"? How can a subculture be formed around the rising youth popularity in video game recreation, and how has such a general term come to mean specifically "video game players"?. The answer lies in how we prefer to socialize and bond over games rather than other means, we take games past being a leisure activity and into being a serious hobby, and finally, most of us have been playing videogames since childhood.

One of the most important things that defines modern gamers as a subculture is our willingness to bond over videogames rather than through normal means. Gamers at school bond together and form their own "gaming cliques". These cliques often operate like a normal clique, but instead of holding events such as parties and judging how well an individual "fits in" through that, gaming groups determine how well someones "fits in" through video games. For example, my friends and I who are gamers often get together and throw "parties". At these parties, we tote our laptops over along with all of our expensive gaming peripherals. After settling down with junk food, we sit down at the same table and play video games together until the sun comes up. We are creating friendships and bonding, while not through conventional social means, but through games. However, gaming groups are not always as inclusive as mine. At our school, there is a recent surge in popularity in the game "League of Legends". I had met a large group of friends through playing this game, first online. Even so, after playing online with all of them for many hours, it felt completely natural when I made the transition into hanging out with them in real life. However, one of the main feature of the game is that you play in teams of five against other teams of five. Due to this, it's very easy to find a set of four other people that you enjoy playing with the most and then playing with them exclusively. This inevitably forms small factions that hold some hostility toward each other. 

Eventually, elitist groups, who think that they're better than everyone else at school, start to form, and all of a sudden there were people who I didn't like in real life just because of competition online. Most players are inclined to have good sportsmanship, but during matches "BM" (bad manners), sometimes gets shown. There are gamers at our school who legitimately dislike other gamers at our school as a result of this. It's interesting to see how gamers can be influenced so heavily by games, especially when the nature of the game itself, like League of Legends, starts to affect the social dynamics of gamer. Even so, there are good points. For example, when I met the League of Legends gamers, I didn't know any of them at all, yet they were still friendly when we were playing. This is because they were judging me based on how good at the game I was, or to some degree, how fun I was to play with. This had nothing to do with how I was in real life. Later, when I went to parties with them, I found all of them generally friendly and genuinely good people. This is because a lot of gamers could care less about an individual's real life personality or appearance and judge them only based on their gaming ability. This is a key, defining factor of being a gamer. Because of the nature of the game market, gamer groups that form around a computer game like League of Legends likely do not have much overlap with gamers that are interested in a fighting game like Super Smash Brothers (SSB). However, I personally play both, although I play SSB "casually". At our school, the group that formed around SSB goes to a classroom every single lunch period to play matches against each other, calling themselves "The Gamer's Club". The Gamer's Club also holds a wide variety of card games, and people started coming from all around with their laptops or handheld devices to play against each other, enjoying the environment in the Gamer's Club.  The Gamer's Club is an artifact of the modern day gaming culture as it encompasses many aspects of the gamer's desire to socialize using video games.

It was a great place to meet other gamers with the same interests as yourself and bond over video games while you were at it. One of the questions that you may have asked yourself by now is: "how can video games be so important that they're controlling the social lives of gamers"? The answer is the second aspect of gamers: "we take video games way too seriously". In fact, we even created a term for people who play videogames but doesn't take it very seriously: "casual gamer". Most casual gamers do not identify themselves as gamers at all, and only play "casual" games. There is however, a large market for these casual games that many video game developers at targeting. Casual games are defined as requiring little skill, practice, or time commitment to be able to play and enjoy. A majority of these games are for mobile phones, such as "Angry Birds", "Mega Run", and "Cytus". These games are easy to pick up and play within seconds and become instantly fun and gratifying. However, even though some casual gamers spend a large amount of time on these games, due to the nature of them, they do not fall under the subculture of "gamer". Games that are targeted toward gamers often require adeptness in a variety of skills, such as reflex (Call of Duty, Battlefield), rhythm (osu!, DDR), strategy (Starcraft, Age of Empires), and teamwork (DotA, League of Legends). In order to become better at these games, gamers often practice these games for hours on end, pouring all of their free time into honing these skills. As the experience of a gamer grows, gamers often find themselves able to carry skills over from other games into games from a similar genre. This often leads to huge time commitments. There is another category of games, MMO (massive multiplayer online), where time commitment is the largest factor. A skilled player will still lose to someone who has been playing longer, due to a "leveling" and "power" system most of them employ. Because of this, MMO gamers are a subsect of the subculture that is often looked down upon by other gamers due to the nature of the game they play. Because of the amount of practice and interest a wide base of players can pour into a single game, sometimes games can transcend into what is known as an "E-sport" - a game with a professional scene. Tourneys are held for these games that are televised on online webstreams that many gamers tune into to watch and try to see how they can further hone their skills to become professionals. What is so attracting about E-Sports is that every single player is just some teenager or young adult who happens to love the game and decided they could make a living off tournament money. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the article "Jack of Smarts" by Justin Peters in Common Culture about poker players in every single way. Poker players see professionals "walk away with @2.5 million, and the near-worshipful admiration of millions of delusional amateurs like myself", not unlike myself when I watch South Korean Starcraft tournaments. The poker player subculture and the gamer subculture are both similar in that many people wish to break out into the professional scene. Ironically, the competitive drive is what fuels the deepest bonds between such a vast demographic of people as gamers.


The last aspect of being a gamer is simple: we all love playing video games too much for our own good. Most gamers of my generation have nostalgic memories of trying to play games like Pokemon on our Game Boys under the covers in bed, or going over to our friend's house to play Super Smash Brothers Melee on their Gamecube's. Sometimes we uncover our old, dusty Gamecube controller that doesn't work anymore, or an old game cartridge long broken, and we hesitate to throw it out. In the end we usually don't. These old treasures from our childhood are also artifacts of the modern gaming subculture. Even though the first few games that we have the most vivid memories of playing are different, all of us own an artifact that symbolizes our entrance into the gaming world. Almost all gamers have video games intertwined into their golden childhood days. In fact, many people in our generation do as well, but some simply "grow out" of it, decided they were "too cool" to be playing videogames, or continued playing the casual games. The rest find harder and more difficult games to play, and become gamers as they go into adolescence. However, it's a guarantee that most gamers still enjoy going back and revisiting games, especially their childhood artifacts. Even though newer games have come out, I'll never refuse a chance to go back and play Pokemon Gold, Starcraft:BW, or Super Smash Bros Melee. In fact, half the reason Nintendo is the most profitable and biggest gaming company is because it caters specifically toward creating amazing games that can be enjoyed by all ages. The majority of what gamers' consider "classics" - games that everyone should play because basically every gamer has played and loved it - are games that they typically played as a kid, such as Pokemon or Legend of Zelda, to name the biggest two, both by Nintendo. In fact, it's a long running joke line amongst my friends to say "if you didn't play Pokemon when you were younger, you had no childhood". It can almost be argued that the entirety of the gaming market is an artifact of the modern gaming subculture, as the demand from our generation is what formed the rise of titan companies like EA, Blizzard, or Valve. These games create an assured and definite bond between gamers, knowing that they at least have a small handful of common games that they love even if they currently play different games.

Gamers are mostly misunderstood for being antisocial and obsessed, but that isn't always the case. As shown to the contrary, gamers are primarily held together by socializing over videogames, taking video games to a higher competitive level, and sharing common childhood experiences with video games. It is a subculture that I identify with heavily and enjoy being part of. I'm proud to be a gamer.

Television as an American Artifact

            The flat box casts an eerie glow across the room, mesmerizing the gaze of a single individual. His limbs are sore from a hard day's work, his mind exhausted from the stress in life. And so he sits, entranced and drawn into the vivid fantasy world of brightly lit pixels. Without a doubt, the television captures the very essence of modern day American culture and lifestyle, by playing off own perception of the American Dream and the ideal life, rampant consumerism, and our unhealthy and desensitized lives.

            The American Dream, the lavish and high life with endless opportunities, is what has been packaged and shipped off to foreign nations about the core of America's ideals. Swathes of immigrants have come to America to pursue this dream, but as we have seen in history time and time again, such dreams remain dreams for many Americans. We eventually see the disparity between what we are able to attain and the ideal life that we want in America. This is exactly what modern day television plays off of. Television series paint the fantasies that we were "meant" to live, and for simply that reason, many Americans choose to indulge themselves excessively with it. We live hours upon hours of our lives in this fictional world, and as a result the modern media continues to try to render grander lives on the screen. As Kalle Lasn mentions in Culture Jam, her friends in foreign countries had a grand and exaggerated view of common American life, but when they came to visit, they were shocked at how disjointed and unattached from reality our day-to-day lives were. I certainly have a similar experience when I participated in a school exchange student delegation to Iwata, Japan. My host sister watched American television series from time to time, mainly titles on the Disney Channel such asDrake and Josh, iCarly, and The Suite Life of Zach and Cody. As we were discussing life in America, I quickly came to realize that she was drawing assumptions from these fictional shows that were completely incorrect. Not every American lived in a great big two-story house with a nice green lawn, goes out to parties all the time, and school isn't nearly as interesting. The American Dream is at the heart of our culture, and this vision still lives on today. However, for most Americans there is a sick twist: the dream is fed to them through the television.

            Television also captures another mainstay of American culture: our ridiculous appetite for consumerism. If fantasy television programming wasn't already bad enough, every half hour we have to sit through about five to ten minutes of commercials. This begins to seem more ridiculous the more you think about it. For the amount of actual television programming we watch, we spend an additional half of that time watching commercials. There isn't anything fantasy-like or engaging about commercials. No, the reason commercials are on the TV is to feed our culture-drilled urge to go out and indulge in material goods, whether they are necessary or not. As Kalle Lasn says, the mass media is playing off our perception of "cool", the "soma" of the modern world. We are being brainwashed by the "constant barrage" of the media to go out and buy, buy, and buy. Consumerism is fueled by the endless innate competitive drive of Americans, but twisted into the respect that we have the urge to always appear better than our peers. So we go out and we buy the newest iPhone. Apple knows what they're doing. They release a new one, without many technical improvements, but still slapping on the label of "the newest, revolutionary technology!" Culture is defined as a set of unspoken values and agreements shared by the general public. There is an unspoken agreement between peers when they see someone has the newest phone, the best clothes, or even the newest model of cars. Even at our school, we see the one kid with the Audi roar out of the parking lot and we shake our heads in disdain. But how much of our disdain is disapproval of his lavish spending, and how much is our own jealousy that we couldn't afford the same? Day in and day out, we hear the commercials on TV pushing us on to buy the newest products. We come to our schools and workplaces and we hear the chatter, we see the people pushing up their Prada glasses and checking their G-Shock watches, and somewhere in the back of our minds the idea that that was "cool" is instilled within all of us. Televised commercials, mass media, and America's ludicrous consumerism, without a doubt, go hand in hand.

            Obesity isn't a part of our culture. However, our unhealthy lifestyle is definitely a part of American culture. One of the biggest culprits of America's general reckless abandon attitude toward health, along with fast food and food processing, is most likely the TV, being something that can keep a viewer still and prevent them from exercising on their spare time. Although recently we've taken a step back from excessive indulgence in food, the general atmosphere of the media toward advertising food still remains the same. Commercials about Coke, Doritos, and Fruity Loops are everywhere, but can you even remember the last time you saw a commercial on TV about fresh produce or free-range cattle? It's an endless siege by the media, pushing us to ignore our health. But it doesn't just stop at physical health. Our very own mental health is affected by television, primarily through what Kalle Lasn calls "jolts". These jolts are delivered through fast changing camera angles or other methods to evoke our base instinct of "fight or flight". However, we've become conditioned to it as time went on, to the point where our children are developing higher rates of ADHD than ever before. Television has also desensitized us to shock, which Lasn defines as images of "killings, gunshots, assaults, car chases, and rapes", so on and so forth. Our emotional health is also being affected by fantasized love scenes, and heart-wrenching images of unfortunate children in third world countries. However, just like with jolts and shock, we've become desensitized as a whole to these emotions after seeing the soppy romance for the hundredth time, the commercial about donating money the thousandth time. Everything about us is being desensitized through television. We are even being desensitized to reality itself. In one of the most thought provoking lines that I've ever read in a book, Lasn prompts us to "jot down in a notebook the number of times a day you laugh at real joked with real people in real situation against the number of times you laugh at media-generated jokes, the amount of sex you have against the amount of sex you watch, and so on." With this, I quickly realized how the television was numbing our grasp on reality itself.

            A culture built on mass media delivered through the television, a culture that wiles its hours away in the fantasy world inside the borders of the screen, a culture addicted to the "soma" of "cool" and "consumerism", a culture losing its grip on reality through the TV screen: that's American culture in the modern day world. Perhaps one of the greatest and most harmful inventions in the last few centuries, there is no greater "American Artifact" than the television.