CULTURE JAMMING PROJECT

As part of the culture jamming theme we have been discussing lately in lectures and tutorials, we were assigned to a group to create our own culture jam. It was hoped that our culture jam would get the attention of mainstream audiences and the media, but hopefully not get us (or maybe more importantly the university) in any major legal trouble.

Our group discussed many different ideas for a relevant culture jam that would hopefully get noticed. After a much discussion we decided to focus on events around and pertaining to the Gold Coast. We found out that the tickets for the Big Day Out 2011 were coming out in a couple of weeks, so we decided to use the Big Day Out as our culture jam. Our plan was to see if we could get people to believe that the Big Day Out was being cancelled because of the ongoing construction of the new Gold Coast hospital.

In order to make this somewhat believable we decided we had to make up a character that could pose as an official from the Big Day Out. Our group created a Gold Coast businessman named Alfred Baxter who we claimed was the founder and CEO of the Big Day Out event. The group members and I gave him an official Facebook and Twitter pages to make him plausible as an Big Day Out official. We also edited the official Big Day Out wikipedia page to include Alfred Baxter as a co-founder and CEO of Big Day Out, as well as inserted a paragraph explaing the possible cancellation of the event. Much to our amusement and at times frustration, we noticed everytime we would post some new information onto the wikipedia page it would get replaced after a few minutes with the original information.

Our overall goal of disturbing the Big Day Out with fake cancellation notices because of the new Gold Coast hospital was a bust. But we did manage to ruffle the feathers of a few people with our culture jam. After some early posts as the fake Alfred Baxter onto the official Big Day Out facebook page proclaiming the possibility of the event we were shot down by real Big Day Out people. Who announced to everyone listed on the page that we were not to be trusted and weren't really part of the Big Day Out. After some more posts we managed to get a few people to get concerned about the possible cancellation. So on some parts we were successful and on others we weren't as successfull.