Needs some work

We Got a Real Jam Goin' Down

A Response to Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn

Kalle Lasn has some serious issues with capitalism and consumerism. In his book Culture Jam he gives us the ever-so-positive message "We can change the world" on the very first page. He then dives down into biased and over-exaggerated descriptions of depressed, lonely, lazy Americans. He makes the assumption that we all follow a routine of waking up, going to work, sitting in traffic to get home, watching TV for hours, and then going to bed (Lasn, 2000, xiii). It is undeniable that our current American culture is a result of excessive consumerism and unregulated capitalism. But not all of us feel the need to go shopping when we are depressed. Not all of us watch TV for hours on end to find respite. Lasn's book is formatted to completely bash the way Americans live during the early chapters, but fortunately he is able to redeem himself somewhat in the closing chapters by providing solutions to our many problems. Besides, describing all of our issues in great detail accomplishes nothing if one has not taken the time to come up with a possible course of action. Though I struggled with parts of the book simply because Lasn comes off as arrogant and hostile, he does manage to come in at the end and make a point that "rage drives revolutions (Lasn, 2000, p. 139)." If we want to see change in our country, we need to let ourselves feel angry. I agree that we need change now more than ever, but I am skeptical as to how much will actually change in my lifetime.

Americans Are Depressed

After his introduction, Lasn begins to toss out bits and pieces of information that he concludes as our culture has caused us all to become depressed and lifeless:

               Ten million suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Fourteen million are alcoholics.
               Fifteen million are depressed. Three million suffer panic attacks. Ten million have
               Borderline Personality Disorder. Twelve million have "restless legs." Five million are
               obsessive/compulsive. Two million are manic-depressive. Ten million are addicted to sex.
               (Lasn, 2000, p. 9)

Lasn points fingers at the way we live, but naturally I can't help but repeat the mantra from my Psychology classes, "Correlation does not equal causation." I could simply argue we've come a long way in the past 50 years as far as understanding disorders goes. We are able to diagnose these things much easier these days. Combine that with our massive population increase, and of course the numbers appear disturbing.

Flowing from the amount of disorders diagnosed in America to the excessive amount of time spent watching our favorite shows, I get the feeling he believes we develop disorders by sitting near a TV. Lasn says, "Look at the way most of us relax. We come home after work, exhausted. We turn on the TV-- a reflex... We sit there passively hour after hour, barely moving except to eat." (Lasn, 2000, p. 11) Is this how you spend your evenings? I know that when I get home around 4pm, I usually change into my gym clothes to do a four to six mile run or hike. Afterwards, I'll have a nice, hot shower, deal with work emails, talk with friends for a while, and maybe watch this past week's episode of The Walking Dead if I haven't done so already. I usually have a ton of homework to catch up on, so I rarely watch more than two hours of anything in any given week. I don't know anyone that sits in front of their TV for hours each day.

Regardless, I completely understand why Lasn has this view. There are countless studies looking at the effect of TV addiction. In Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszenthmihalyi's article Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor, we find that, "On average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a day to the pursuit-- fully half of their leisure time, and more than on any single activity save work and sleep (Kubey & Csikszenthmihalyi, 2009, p. 148)." I'm envious of people that have three or more free hours in a day. I think the issue here is not how much time we spend in front of a TV but rather what we are subjected to when we hit the power button on the remote control. Every time I watch the latest episode of New Girl, I end up thinking to myself, "That dress Zooey Deschanel is wearing is so cute. I should find something like that to wear." There's nothing wrong with the clothes in my closet, and I really don't need more. But as Lasn suggests, television has that magical way of making a person want more instead of pushing us to focus on what we need.

Thirteen Years Makes All the Difference in the World

Culture Jam was first published in 1999 with this edition released in 2000. Perhaps my varying views of television are a result of living in a time dominated by the web. When Lasn wrote this book, it wasn't uncommon for a household to not have a computer or cell phone. Nowadays, this is very much the norm as most of us are able to check the Internet or our email from almost anywhere. I literally cannot go to work without my iPhone because if I can't access my e-mail while driving from client to client, I may miss a cancellation. Heaven forbid anyone take the time to make a phone call these days.

Who wouldn't enjoy these books? I mean seriously.

In any case, all these years ago, the drastic effects of the world wide web were already becoming apparent. Lasn writes that he knew man that did nothing but surf the web and had lost the ability to really enjoy a book (Lasn, 2000, p. 43).  More people are beginning to experience this result from too much time spent on the Internet. In Nicholas Carr's article Is Google Making Us Stupid?, we see that scholars across America are dealing with attention issues. Carr quotes a pathologist in regards to these developing mental habits, "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or print." (Carr, 2008). Ironically, when I first read this article, it took me about half an hour to finish it even though it is not really that long simply because I was constantly distracted by my iPhone, an email, a text message, a new notification on Facebook, or a random thought to look up something on IMDB. Television may not have had such a drastic impact on our attention spans, but Internet browsing certainly has affected the way my generation seeks out information. Writing an essay of this length is also something that has taken me multiple sit-down attempts to come up with a response to Culture Jam.

Consumerism and the Spectacle

Americans aren't in control of what they buy because advertising companies have become adept at appealing to our most primal motives. In Jib Fowles's article Advertising's Fifteen Basic Appeals, he writes that, "An advertisement communicates by making use of a specially selected image....which is designed to stimulate subrational impulses and desires even when they are at ebb, even if they are unacknowledged by their possessor (Fowles, 2009, p. 73)." By coupling our innermost desires with endorsements from celebrities we are almost helpless against the constant bombardment of information in our daily lives telling us we need to buy things in order to live a certain way.

Celebrities are all over TV and the Internet. In John Harris's article commenting on Guy Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle, Harris quotes, "As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live (Harris, 2012)." Basically Americans are living a manufactured life. Everything we do in our lives is a result of watching TV shows and reading about celebrities. We drink appletinis because the guy from Scrubs likes those fruity drinks. We buy brand name gym clothes because our favorite celebrity wears Nike. Is there anything we buy that isn't influenced in some way by the media?

Side Note: Pocket Devices + Sharing

I have a feeling that if Kalle Lasn wrote a follow-up book, there would be a lot of focus on our computers and iPhones. What do you do when you are waiting in line at the grocery store or at the doctor's office? You might pull out your iPhone or Android to play a simple little game or browse news articles. This is innocent enough, but it's become a habit for nearly every event of our lives. When we sit down for dinner with our friends, we look at our phones while we wait on the servers to bring our food. When we go on a hike, we take pictures with our phones so that we will have something to post on Instagram. When we run or go to the gym, we have to upload our work-out to Nike+ and Fitocracy so all of our Facebook and Twitter friends can see that we are being active. Recently a friend of mine joked on Facebook, "My Nike+ app crashed when I was uploading my run. All of my Nike+ friends will be disappointed. If I can't share that I ran, did I even really run????" The spectacle of our lives has turned into constantly checking-in on arbitrary applications throughout the day to show that we are indeed living. My generation seems to have forgotten the original purpose of a phone. Thirteen years ago, I would have called my grandmother to tell her what happened at work this past week. Now I just complain on an app, and she "likes" my posts.


Blame the Corporations

Whether the issue is too much television or too much web browsing, we can point our fingers at corporations for the anxiety and consumerism attitude in America. Advertising is everywhere whether we are conscious of it or not. Lasn proposes we show our anger and let the corporations know we aren't going to take any more of their bullshit. "Rage," he says, "is good (Lasn, 2000, p. 140)." Corporations are very much in control of what we see on TV, read in the news, or see hyperlinked on various websites. They want us to purchase their items even if we really have no actual need for said products. Oftentimes, attempts to show how evil and wasteful corporations can be are deterred by networks, magazines, newspapers, or websites that don't want to lose major sponsorships from those large companies, as Lasn mentions throughout his book, so it is no easy task to "demarket" our lives.

Lasn says we should learn to be confrontational with corporations (Lasn, 2000, p. 149). This alone is not enough to stir up major change when the issue at hand is really one in regards to regulation. If more people could be aware of the less-than-ideal conditions surrounding the production of their sneakers or McNuggets, perhaps those corporations would lose a bit of their power on our psyche. Recently, my roommate linked me to a video that details the incredibly inhumane environments of farm animals in America. It was shocking to see the way cows, pigs, and chickens are often mutilated and killed. (Visit http://www.whosagainstanimalcruelty.org/ if you would like to have a look for yourself.) I felt angry and disgusted that our government policies allow for this sort of treatment. I was in tears by the end of the video, and I thought that if someone had shown me something like this when I was a teenager I probably would have stopped eating fast food a long time ago. Anyway, if this kind of information could be shown on the nightly news, I believe some people would stop pulling into McDonalds to get a Happy Meal for their kids.

Lasn's book begins in an outlandish and angry tone, but once we read more of the book and become fully aware of the issues affecting our daily decisions from what to wear to what to eat, the drastic need for change in American policies becomes blatantly obvious. We are no longer living real lives but rather a gigantic spectacle of life controlled by advertising. Corporations tell us to buy things, and we follow through. We continue to buy more things than we need at the expense of the planet, and at our current rate of consumption, our future generations are going to have a lot of mess to clean up. Kalle Lasn may be a bitter old man, but he's got a point. We can't keep trying to live our lives in the way corporations see fit.

References

(Not in exact APA format)

Lasn, K. 2000. Culture Jam. HarperCollins Publishers Inc. New York, NY.
Kubey, R. and Csikszentmihalyi, M. 2009. Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor In Common Culture (p. 148).
Fowles, J. 2009. Advertising's Fifteen Basic Appeals in Common Culture. (p. 73).
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/30/guy-debord-society-spectacle