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Title: Culture Jam : How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge--and Why We Must by Kalle Lasn ISBN: 0-688-17805-7 Publisher: Quill Pub. Date: 07 November, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.87 (46 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Raving review
Comment: If, for some reason, I was able to create a law whereby everyone was required to read the book Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn, I strongly believe that the world would be a better place. In his book, Lasn points out to his readers all of the errors that our society has made in the process of creating our culture.
He touches many of our culture's problems (consumption, poor body image, environmental issues) and examines how the media has had its affect on each of them. The media has become the people. By this, I mean the people live through "brands, products, fashions, celebrities, entertainments." These things "are our culture now. [The people's] role is mostly to listen and watch-and then based on what we have heard and seen, to buy (p. xiii)." The media has turned us into lean mean buying machines-always striving for the newest and the coolest item on the market (which isn't even cool until the media says so).
People have separated themselves from their natural environment, and now live mostly through a consumptive, technology based world. In many ways this impacts the environment negatively, but mostly because "If the Earth felt less like something out there and more like an extension of our bodies, we'd care for it like kin (p. 6)." With all of the problems in our natural environment, people still pretend not to acknowledge or care about it.
The way the media works, Lasn explains, is first by creating fear; fear of not fitting in, not being cool, fear of traveling to foreign places (terrorism), and fear of corruption. "Fear breeds insecurity-and then consumer culture offers us a variety of ways to buy our way back to security (p. 17)." The fear implanted on the people guides their actions everyday. People have become "mediated self-constructions (p. 44)" at the aid of our media. We don't have to think if the media shows us everything from how to fight with our friends to how to have sex with our lovers.
Lasn's book is about "wanting to live 'not as an object but as a subject of the story' (p. 100)." He inspires the reader to create their own world and offers a variety of ways to help it along. If people were tuned in to how the media downplays one's own identity, perhaps they would turn off the TV and go outside for a walk or talk with a friend.
Lasn's book has been the most effective that I have read on this topic. He puts things into words that I had only scrambled thoughts of. He pulls the man out from behind the curtain and points his finger. "You are the cause of our suffering" he says to corporate America. He addresses old issues and concerns with a new twist. For example, instead of just fewer cars on the road, Lasn suggests to create "cities designed chiefly with pedestrians, bicycles, and public transport in mind. Not just new ecofriendly products, but new consumption patterns and new lifestyles (p. 112)."
Lasn says it all in a manner that demands the reader's attention, thus really getting his point across. The voice in the book becomes the voice of a charismatic speaker in the reader's mind. The book reads conversationally with the use of different literary devices. He uses repetition to create rhythm and really leave an impression on the reader.
Culture Jam really hit home for me. Everywhere I look, I relate the book to what I see. When I was reading it I couldn't put it down, and now that I've finished the book my mind still obsesses with it. The themes of the book are so prevalent in our culture- it's impossible to ignore.
Rating: 2
Summary: No "Revolution" Here.
Comment: I had bigger expectations for this book. I am familar with Kalle Lasn's Adbusters organization and agree with what they stand for. However, Lasn's attempts to start a revolution and change the world in this book are a laughable failure. Granted, he does have some good stuff early in the book about the pernicious effects on society caused by corporate propaganda and saturation marketing. Especially good are his descriptions on how this has caused low self-esteem in girls, aggression in teenagers, and the unhealthy sedentary lifestyle of modern Americans. I also enjoyed his section on dealing with telemarketers.
However, the book fails when Lasn tries to come up with ways to change the situation. First his inflammatory writing style with his use of adjectives like "chicken-ass", "lamebrained", and other attention-grabbers makes him guilty of some of the mass media behavior he's criticizing. Meanwhile, he fails to deliver any concrete ideas for changing the current situation, and can only give vague sloganeering like "take back our lives", "change the world", "rise up" and other vague polemics that sound like the ravings of a teenager who's mad that his parents won't let him go out on Saturday.
Worst yet is Lasn's use of a group called the Situationists as an inspiration for his hoped-for revolution. This group's only claim to fame was a few small riots in Paris in 1968. Their leader was trying to change society so there would be true intellectual freedom, and an economy where nobody would have to work and would spend their time discussing philosophical ideas. This man seemed to think he was already living in that world and refused to work, and begged off others instead. You can't live in your desired world until you have created it. The Situationists caused a little fuss then disappeared, though Lasn portrays them as a major revolutionary movement with society-shattering ideas. They weren't revolutionary, and neither is this book.
If you're interested in the effects that corporate propaganda has on our society and culture, and would like to learn about ways to possibly make a change, then I still recommend the work of Lasn's Adbusters organization. Go to their website and check it out, but read this book at your own peril.
Rating: 3
Summary: Divisive yet insightful
Comment: Kalle Lasn's 'Culture Jam' is indeed a call to arms for a 21st century generation that seems more distracted than ever by the pervasive power of mindless consumption. Adbusters magazine has been at the forefront of consumer critique, developing a manifesto that obviously strikes a chord with a growing readership, given its current circulation of over 120,000.
In the opening introduction Lasn makes some rather remarkable statements: "For us feminism has run out of steam" p.xii; he then goes on to state "The old political battles......- black versus white, Left versus Right, male versus female - will fade into the background" p.xvi. This is an ignorantly optimistic conjecture in a world where aparthied still existed in Africa's largest economy less than a generation ago, a world where the vast majority of women are denied the same political rights as men and in the U.S. where they don't even have a universal healthcare system. Lasn seems to suffer from the same illusions as his heros the situationists, that somehow, in the West at least, basic human needs have all been satisfied i.e. freedom from poverty, hunger and homelessness. This may not be a wild idea in Canada where Lasn and Adbusters are based. Consistently touted by the U.N. as the best country in the world in which to live, Canada's reputation for higher standards of living is in part due to the pioneering campaigns of noted left-wingers like Tommy Douglas. Douglas, a former premier of Saskatchewan brought in a cheap and affordable healthcare system for his province in the 1960's, which soon spread throughout the rest of Canada thereafter.
It is true to say that much of the time identity politics operates in a postmodern culture obsessed with diversity in and of itself, rather than any notion of universal revolution. A position which plays into the hands of largely right-wing libertarians who see greater diversity as an opportunity to develop new markets. But to believe that gender, race and class are no longer issues that affect the first world gives those on the right too much comfort.
Other dubious assertions include Lasn's belief that daily exposure to media violence shapes the way we feel about crime and punishment "even though I can't prove it with hard facts" p.18
On the more postive side of the book, there's an interesting piece on how we in the West are increasingly finding it more difficult to appreciate our immediate surroundings without framing it with a camera viewfinder. Lasn also uses the example of a poet who read his poems at parties and no one listened to him, but when he played recordings of himself, everyone listened (shades of David Cronenberg's 1982 film 'Videodrome').
Where Lasn is at his strongest is in his study of the development of corporate power under American law. The 1886 ruling by the Supreme Court in the U.S. which granted the private corporation the rights of a 'natural person' under the U.S. Constitution, has had profound effects on American political and economic culture since then. Unlike most individuals, corporations have huge financial resources and as a consequence have a much greater say in the running of the economy, greater stamina in the courts and greater access to the media (which they probably own anyway) than any individual could hope to have. Globalization is the effective spread of this corporate disease throughout the rest of the world.
Another important area that Lasn tackles is how we measure prosperity. Classical economists seem to believe that there is no shortage to the Earth's natural resources and even if we did deplete all of them we should still be able to develop the technology to provide for everyone on the planet. The problem with classical economics is that it is not a science i.e. it is not concerned with an understanding of nature, but simply with an understanding of models. The best example of which is the concept of GDP, which increases everytime money is put into the economy for whatever reason; war, illness, cleaning up environmental damage and so on. A better way of measuring prosperity would be the ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) which takes into account factors such as pollution, depletion of nonrenewable resources and industrial related health costs.
Despite his attacks on the traditional Left, Lasn seems perfectly happy to hold true to explicitly Marxist sentiments such as living not as an object of history but as a subject: "That's about as good a working definition of the culture jammers ethos as you'll ever hope to find" p.100. Lasn also makes a welcome attack on the Slacker generation whose disdain for any kind of earnestness in politics has become the apathetic norm. We should use our irreverance pointedly but a surfeit of irony contributes to social corrosion and a general malaise in putting the effort in.
It is in the media world where corporate power has its most obvious influence, especially in the U.S. It's almost impossible to find objective news on American commercial T.V. The only reason that CNN runs Adbusters' commercials for Buy Nothing Day is that Ted Turner likes to think of himself as a bit of a liberal in comparison to his arch-nemesis Rupert Murdoch. Lasn's difficulty in getting airtime elsewhere for his Adbustes' commercials shows an open ideological bias at work within media conglomerates, whose primary function is not to provide news but to sell advertising space.
Lasn's tract is useful in highlighting the increasing hegemony of corporate power in America. Although his lefty-bashing has less impact for many of us in Europe where left-wing governments can still initiate large and meaningful changes. However, American foreign policy influences the whole world and 'Culture Jam' makes us more aware of the forces that shape it.
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Title: No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs by Naomi Klein ISBN: 0312421435 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John De Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H. Naylor, David Horsey, Scott Simon ISBN: 1576751996 Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate by Naomi Klein, Debra Ann Levy ISBN: 0312307993 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 04 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers by Alissa Quart ISBN: 0738206644 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser ISBN: 0060938455 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 08 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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