the environment
politics, the environment, fashion,
culture, and nutrition; to visual artwork and poetry; to more journalistic or
academic articles on a variety of topics (recent issues have featured articles on true cost economics, the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and the effects of
Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War). During his “revivals,” Reverend
Billy also invites audience members to participate: to
sing along, confess
their sins, or dance. Through his Web site, audience members can discuss
issues and share strategies for creating more awareness among consumers;
they can also find performance scripts that they
can borrow, change, and
enact in local contexts. We posit that culture jammers thus hope to turn
typically passive activities into active ones in which they create culture rather
than simply consume it. In
doing so, they aim to redefine themselves and
their relationships with consumption, and to redefine possibilities for the future.
Both Adbusters and Reverend Billy engage in cultural production as
they alter and give new, resistant meanings to popular cultural symbols. Culture jammers interrupt how public spaces are typically used and under stood “in ways that hold the potential for education to be contemporane
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332 JENNIFER A. SANDLIN AND JENNIFER L. MILAM
ous with social change and identities in the making” (Ellsworth, 2005,
p. 58). Culture jammers thus clearly demonstrate how popular culture is a
field of contestation. Adbusters, through its “subvertisements,” plays with and gives new meaning to the “memes” of popular culture, including the iconography associated with multinational corporations such as
McDonald’s, Nike, Absolut Vodka, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, and numerous others. Memes are media viruses that spread throughout
society?for example, advertisingjingles, quotes from movies and situation
comedies, advertising slogans, and the like that “work their way into every
day conversations” (Duncombe, 2002, p. 369). Adbusters uses the forms of media that viewers are already familiar with, and takes advantage of the
power of already-existing memes that are part of
consumer consciousness.
However, through subvertisements, Adbusters “jams” or
disrupts dominant
memes in ways that expose negative social, environmental, cultural, or
ethical consequences of the practices of multinational corporations; in so
doing, Adbusters lures viewers into interactions “with ‘alternative’ subject matter which poses as a ‘dominant’ media deployment” (Tietchen, 2001, p.
117). Thus Adbusters ‘subvertisements operate like vaccines or antidotes to
memes, as they shake us out of consumer trances and refocus our attention
on messages that run counter to dominant media ideology (Boyd, 2002). If, as Lasn (1999) argues, “whoever has the memes has the power” (p. 123), then one potential avenue for social change lies in hijacking memes to
disrupt and counteract the very messages they
are trying
to convey.
For example, Figure 3 appropriates the memes originally created and
circulated by Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume advertising campaign. However, this subvertisement shows not a runway model which a reader
might, at first glance, believe she/he is seeing, but instead an emaciated woman
leaning over a toilet presumably
to vomit. The subvertisement gives new
meaning to the media-produced ideal of “thinness” and
to the Calvin
