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).
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