• An Activists Guide to Exploiting the Media :-) Every battle we fight is a battle for the hearts and minds of other people. The only chance we have of reaching people who haven't yet heard what we've got to say is through the media. We might, with good reason, regard the papers and broadcasters with extreme suspicion, we might feel cheapened and compromised by engaging with them. But the war we're fighting is an information war, and we have to use all the weapons at our diposal. Whether we use the media or not, our opponents will.

1.  Media prospector Bill McKibben wonders about the exchange value of such information: We believe we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.

2.  Herbert Schiller considers the interlocked issues of privatized information and limited access: The commercialization of information, its private acquisition and sale, has become a major industry. While more material than ever before, in formats created for special use, is available at a price, free public information supported by general taxation is attacked by the private sector as an unacceptable form of subsidy...An individual's ability to know the actual circumstances of national and international existence has progressively diminished.

3.  Corporate ownership of the newsmedia, the subsumption of an ever-larger number of publishing companies and television networks into an ever-smaller number of multinationals, and the increased privatization of truth by an information-rich, technocratic elite are not newly-risen issues. Consider the observations of Neal Gabler: Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could argue that the theatricalization of American life is the major cultural transformation of this century.

4.  Culture jammers answer to that name. "Jamming" is CB slang for the illegal practice of interrupting radio broadcasts or conversations between fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities, and other equally jejune hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture whose operant mode is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of symbols.

5.  Jello Biafra once observed: "There's a big difference between 'simple crime' like holding up a 7-11, and 'creative crime' as a form of expression...Creative crime is...uplifting to the soul...What better way to survive our anthill society than by abusing the very mass media that sedates the public?...A prank a day keeps the dog leash away!"

6.  Sucking Chest Wound's Wayne Morris speaks for all when he says: "I get really angry with the biased coverage that's passed off as objective journalism. By taking scraps of the news and blatantly manipulating them, we're having our revenge on manipulative media."

7.  Culture jammers often make use of what might be called "guerrilla" semiotics -- analytical techniques not unlike those employed by scholars to decipher the signs and symbols that constitute a culture's secret language, what literary theorist Roland Barthes called "systems of signification." These systems, notes Barthes in the introduction to Elements of Semiology, comprise nonverbal as well as verbal modes of communication, encompassing "images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these."

8.  As Gareth Branwyn, a one-time 'zine publisher and longtime resident of virtual communities, points out: The current saturation of relatively inexpensive multimedia communication tools holds tremendous potential for destroying the monopoly of ideas we have lived with for so long...A personal computer can be configured to act as a publishing house, a broadcast-quality TV studio, a professional recording studio, or the node in an international computer bulletin board system

9.  As one resident of a San Francisco-based bulletin board called the WELL noted: This medium gives us the possibility (illusory as it may be) that we can build a world unmediated by authorities and experts. The roles of reader, writer, and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation.