Culture Jamming, Memes,
Social Networks, and the Emerging Media Ecology The "Nike Sweatshop Email" as Object-To-Think-With
Note: This is a work in progress. Send email to peretti@media.mit.edu with comments or suggestions.Nike's web site allows visitors to create custom shoes
bearing a word or slogan -- a service Nike trumpets as being about freedom
to choose and freedom to express who you are. Confronted with Nike's
celebration of freedom, I could not help but think of the people in
crowded factories who actually build Nike shoes. As a challenge to Nike, I
ordered a pair of shoes customized with the word "sweatshop." Nike refused
my order. A contentious email exchange
ensued which was subsequently distributed widely on the Internet as an
email forward. Eventually, news of the dispute was reported in major
newspapers, magazines, and on television. You can read a detailed account
of "My Nike
Media Adventure" in the April 9th issue of The Nation.
My Nike media adventure was mostly an accident -- I never expected the
dispute to generate so much attention. The Nike Sweatshop email took on a
life of its own and sometimes I felt like I was just along for the ride. I
realize now that the campaign thrived because it allowed people to
participate in a larger cultural transformation. The Nike emails became my
guide for understanding this transformation. I found myself engaged in
discussion about social networks, memes, culture
jamming, and bloggers. I began to discern a media ecology
defined by micromedia, middle media, and mass media
(terms to be defined below). What began as a local act of protest grew
into a quest to understand a global transformation.
The purpose of this on-line essay is to share this learning experience
with other activists and researchers. The Nike Sweatshop email will
structure the discussion by serving as an "object-to-think-with", a phrase
sociologist Sherry Turkle coined to describe artifacts that help us
understand complex cultural trends. I trace the Nike Sweatshop email as it
moves through the media ecology, pointing out important concepts,
technologies, and trends as I go. Frequently, I provide links to
supporting materials. This essay is meant to be a guide to a myriad of
useful on-line resources.
Introductory Links: The original
correspondence and links to media coverage are archived on Shey.net.
The story began January 5th, 2001, when I ordered a pair
of Nike shoes customized with the word "sweatshop." My request was laced
with irony: I was asking Nike to help me protest their own labor
practices. My goal was to redirect Nike's publicity machine against the
company it is supposed to promote. The shoe customization service was
designed to associate the Nike brand with personal freedom, so my prank
attempted to turn the tables by using the same service to raise awareness
about the limited freedom enjoyed by Nike sweatshop workers. This simple
strategy is an example of an increasingly popular phenomenon: Culture
Jamming.
Culture Jamming is a strategy that turns corporate power against itself
by co-opting, hacking, mocking, and re-contextualizing meanings. For
people accustomed to traditional politics, Culture Jamming can seem
confusing or even counter-productive. The following email is
representative of the type of message I received from people who were
uncomfortable with Culture Jamming:
Although I received a small number of messages from people who were
baffled by my approach, a growing movement appreciates Culture Jamming.
One of the reasons that the Nike Sweatshop email spread so rapidly is that
there is an informal network of people interested in sharing examples of
successful Culture Jams. Sharing the Nike email was one way to participate
in a larger movement that is advanced by organizations like Adbusters, ®TMark, and the Billboard Liberation
Front. For the growing legions of Culture Jammers, forwarding the Nike
Sweatshop email was just another opportunity to participate in a larger
social movement.
Culture Jamming Links:
I sent the Nike Sweatshops email to a dozen friends and immediately it
began racing around the world like a virus. I was astonished that
something I decided to share with a few close friends could replicate
literally millions of times. I began to receive thousands of emails,
mostly letters of support, from people living on all seven continents.
Without really trying, I had released what biologist Richard Dawkins calls
a meme. Dawkins
describes the meme as a "unit of cultural transmission", such as
"tunes, ideas, catch- phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of
building arches." The most important thing about memes is that they
replicate themselves, "spreading from brain to brain." As the Nike
Sweatshop email spread from Inbox to Inbox, I gained a visceral sense of
what Dawkins had in mind.
The rapid rate at which a meme can spread is explained by the dynamics
of exponential growth. Although not mathematically complex, exponential
growth is notoriously counter- intuitive to human brains. It is shocking
that sending one email to a few friends could launch a global campaign.
But consider this hypothetical scenario. You send an email to 10 friends,
and each friend forwards the email to 10 of their friends. If this process
continues just 6 steps the message will reach a million people. After 10
steps, the message would hypothetically reach more people than the total
population of the earth. This dynamic explains how the Nike email could
spread to so many people in so little time.
However, the dynamics of exponential growth do not ensure that a meme
will spread. Dawkins explains that some memes have "high survival value"
and "infective power" while other memes die out quickly. In the context of
emails, this means that some messages get erased while others get
forwarded. The Nike Sweatshop meme had success because it appealed to
several different demographics, including Culture Jammers, union
organizers, teachers, parents, anti-globalization protesters, human rights
advocates, religious groups, and people who simply enjoy a humorous prank.
The Nike Sweatshop email thrived because it had access to such a wide
range of different social networks.
Since people only forward email to people they know, social networks
were the only way that the Nike Sweatshop message could spread. But this
still does not explain how the meme managed to travel outside of my own
personal social network. After all, I only sent the email to my closest
friends and they only forwarded the message to their closest friends. Yet
in a few weeks, the message was circulating among thousands of people that
none of us knew. At some point the meme jumped from my social network
(left leaning individuals interested in technology), to union organizers,
Culture Jammers, and religious groups. How did this happen?
This jump can be explained by the popular concept of "six degrees of
separation", which was discovered in the 1960s by Harvard psychologist
Stanley Milgram. Milgram's research shows that certain gregarious
individuals belong to many social groups, and as a result they link
several different social networks together. As Malcolm Gladwell explains
in a fascinating New
Yorker article, "a very small number of people are linked to everyone
else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through
those few." These well connected social hubs are the reason that people
far removed from my own social network (e.g. religious groups, members of
the US military, anti-globalization protestors) received the Nike
Sweatshop meme.
Meme Link: Social Network links: Once you have read Gladwell's article, I suggest that you visit the Oracle of Bacon web
site a the University of Virginia. It turns out that actor Kevin Bacon is
also an object-to-think-with. By playing the "6 degrees of Kevin Bacon"
game, you can get a feel for how social networks connect everyone in
Hollywood.
My Nike email started circulating among my friends. But eventually I
was getting messages from enemies. Read some of the
emails I received to get a sense of how the Nike Sweatshop meme jumped
across social networks.
Without modern communication technologies, The Nike
Sweatshop meme would never have existed. Email, personal web sites, and
blogs enable the digital equivalent of word of mouth. The Internet is
revolutionary because it provides a technical distribution network that
overlays social networks. This makes memes spread faster and social
networks more powerful. The concept of six degrees of separation becomes
more relevant when a distribution technology exists with the potential to
actually connect people that are six social steps away from each other.
Dawkins describes memes as self-replicating ideas that spread on their
own, but it is clear that effective distribution technologies are as
important as the meme itself. As the Nike Sweatshop email spread, I gained
new insight into the structure of the contemporary media ecology, leading
me to recognize three classes of distribution technologies:
micromedia, middle media, and mass media.
Micromedia: The Personal Touch Although the personal touch has its charm, it is also unreliable. It is
difficult to predict and impossible to control what friends will want to
share with each other. Even if a meme spreads through email successfully,
there is not a reliable way to determine who received the message or the
total number of people it reached. I still do not have any idea how many
people have received my Nike Sweatshop meme and I have heard estimates
that range widely from less than five hundred thousand to over 15 million.
As the Nike Sweatshop meme circulated, I received thousands of email
messages giving me some idea of the number of people who received the
meme. I assume that most people did not go to the trouble of sending me
email. We can only guess how many people received the meme.
There is another type of micromedia that still has a personal feel but
avoids some of email's unruliness. Thanks to software freely available at
blogger.com, an
exciting self-publishing movement has started on the web. The blog,
short for web log, helps ordinary people publish their personal musing on
the web. Blogs allow people to become personal web curators by compiling
annotated links to web sites that they find interesting. These personal
web sites tend to aggregate small audiences of friends and like-minded
individuals. They can also help transform an obscure web page into a full
blown meme. Soon after the Nike Sweatshop email began circulating, it was
posted on a Blog
site called Shey.net. Tim
Shey originally used his blog to share ideas with a small group of
friends, but the Nike Sweatshop meme began to draw new visitors to his
site. A growing number of other blogs began post the Nike Sweatshop emails
or link to the Shey.net Nike post. Once again, micromedia's personal touch
expanded to reach a larger audience. Since it is easy to count web visits,
I know exactly how many people saw the Nike Sweatshop dialogue at
Shey.net.
Micromedia Links: Like most blogs, Shey.net
is updated regularly with the latest bits of news, gossip, and ideas from
around the web.
The power of micromedia is celebrated in " Micro
vs. Macromedia, The Power of Now", in Content Wire, April 30th, 2001.
Middle Media: The Community Blog Middle media is still in an experimental stage, but it is already
providing a more democratic, participatory model for publishing. At
Plastic.com, for example, particularly active visitors can gain enough
"karma points" to become one of the official editors of the site. The
community defines the topics of interest and the most active members of
that community make sure that the content on the site maintains a certain
level of quality. This democratic structure is highly effective at
identifying issues that matter to the public. This means that middle media
sites have the potential to transform an obscure piece of net lore into a
nationally covered news item. This is exactly what happened in the case of
the Nike Sweatshop meme. Middle media helped a humorous email forward
become a topic of public debate by transforming micromedia buzz into a
newsworthy social issue.
Middle Media Links: New Approaches to Middle Media from the MIT Media Lab: Mass Media: Getting It for Free My initial astonishment gave way to a desire to understand the
transformation. How did a meme transmitted through micromedia and debated
on middle media sites suddenly become a mass media story? The answer to
this question can be explained by the psychology of journalists. Reporters
are often people who have eschewed more lucrative professions because they
want to make a positive social impact by informing the public. However,
many journalists find themselves covering carefully scripted press
conferences, or worse, converting corporate press releases into news
stories. The Internet provides these disgruntled journalists with an
opportunity to discover authentic stories. Reporter after reporter
"discovered" the Nike Sweatshop meme, either as an email forward or on a
site like Plastic.com, and it was clear from the tone of their voices that
they were excited by this process of discovery. I encouraged this
journalistic enthusiasm by saying things like, "it would be awesome if you
did a story" or "it is so cool you found the Nike email on the Internet."
A few days later the Nike Sweatshop meme would be covered by another mass
media outlet.
General media ecology link:
A broad social and technical transformation is creating new
possibilities for political participation and direct action. The emergence
of terms such as culture jamming, social networks, memes, blogs,
micromedia, and middle media, signify the first attempts to grapple with
the emergence of new technologies and social practices. It is difficult to
predict how these concepts will evolve or how current cultural trends will
develop. Although the future is always uncertain, it is clear that there
are exciting opportunities for participation right now.
Activists interested in reproducing the success of the Nike Sweatshop
meme have started asking me for advice. My hope is that this essay will
suggest possibilities for participation. In particular, I encourage
activists, consumers, and citizens to join the thousands who are:
1) challenging corporations with innovative culture jams, These techiques are an effective way to promote political participation
and challenge entrenched power structures.
The Nike Sweatshop meme has run its course, but new memes have already
taken its place in the media ecology. Two recent examples involve creative
resistance to policies advocated by President Bush. An email from the JustSayBlow campaign
speaks directly to our chief executive: "President Bush, if you deny
federal funds to students who won't talk about their drug histories, it's
only fair that you forego your federal salary until you are willing to
come clean with your own drug past." The second example, the "Roll Your
Own Blackout" campaign encourages citizens to protest president Bush's
energy policies by participating in a global voluntary blackout on June
21st: "Light a candle to the sungod, kiss and tell, make love, tell ghost
stories, do something instead of watching television, and have fun in the
dark." In a few months, these memes will join the Nike Sweatshop meme as
fond memories, new memes will emerge, and the process will begin anew.
|