Still Culture Jamming

Culture Jams
1)"When a girl starts feeling like a pig it's very easy to convince herself that she is."(pg.78) The issue of body image is frighteningly truthful. I myself was someone who used media as a mirror for what I should look like. I remember, like the characters that Lasn describes, looking through the pages of People magazine and Seventeen comparing myself to all of the models and celebrities. I was always too fat and my hair too bland that I tried diet pills and dyed my hair starting at a very young age. Even now as an adult and in a loving relationship I find my old body complex coming back to haunt me. At least I didn't develop a true eating disorder like many of my friends did.

2) Lasn complains of the loss of food sensuality. Packaged, branded, and processed foods have replaced real foods. Butter, and I mean real butter is something that our society has been conditioned to scorn. However, this was a food item that was considered a luxury for many of our ancestors. Butter, dare I say it IS sexy, and we as media manipulated Americans instead see it as artery hardening, waistline plumping gobs of evil. While we are convinced that devouring synthetic alternatives like margarine is just fine. We have our heads on backwards.

3) I just really loved all that Lasn had to say in the chapter entitled,"Your Corporate Connection." The whole portion in which he mourned the loss of community at the hands of the auto industry. Can't agree more. He says that our love for cars has made, "the beating heart of community hard to find." I was just thinking about this today as I road my bike all over the Champlain Islands. Why aren't things closer together so we could walk or ride our bikes to get things? Well because the auto industry wouldn't make money off of us.

4)In the section called, "Ecological Economics," Lasn further backs up my previously mentioned sentiment regarding cars. Walking and riding a bike doesn't contribute to our GDP so expansionists don't have any interest in it. These expansionists/economists believe that we should create as much wealth as possible which will then allow people to endeavor into a life of ecological awareness. Really out of touch.

5)The Situationists are a group that I had never heard about prior to reading this book. Although their mission is a bit too radical for my taste I do like that they promote non-conformity to consumer culture. They also, and I really like this, believe that culture should spread in a lateral direction as apposed to a vertical direction.

My question is without being categorized as "radical" or an "extremist," how do we remove ourselves from medias grasp? Especially in a world that is run by technology?