By Christian Baekkelund
In daily life in America currently, and even largely abroad, the
average person has become inundated with increasingly pervasive and
even invasive advertisements. Signs telling consumers to "buy"
this or that they "need" that line the streets. Logos are
stamped on everything from signs to clothing to schools. Every channel
of the TV and every website has an advertisement flashing to the viewer
the qualities of their great new product. This advertising and marketing
deluge has recently hit a critical mass and gave birth to a backlash
of those who thought it had become excessive - the culture jammers
were born.
"Adbusters" is a non-profit magazine published since 1993
about such culture jamming efforts and Adbusters.org is the online
partner to this publication. The magazine is "dedicated to examining
the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental
environment" through trying to get people "mad about corporate
disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry
that pollutes our physical or mental commons". While the physical
pollution protest oriented magazines are not particularly anything
new, the mental aspect of the deluge of advertising is the real unique
focus of Adbusters. The Adbusters website is used to facilitate the
distribution of materials to promote awareness of such problems, and
it also features a limited selection of articles from the print magazine.
Using "spoof ads" and "uncommercials", Adbusters
is able to perpetuate a message that one should question the information
and advertisements they witness on a daily basis. Through the website,
Adbusters has organized a number of protest campaigns launched in
both physical and digital space. For example, during TV Turnoff Week,
Adbusters advocates not watching TV for an entire week, but instead
considering "who's been shaping the way [you] think", and
for Buy Nothing Day, Adbusters attempts to convince people to purchase
no products for a single day. Such campaigns are especially effective
through the website when augmented by video of real-life demonstrations,
as is exemplified in their "foolsfest" demonstration in
which money is thrown from food-courts all over the country down to
the mall floor and video clips of the people scrambling for the money
is archived on the site.
Unlike other culture jamming websites, such as Subvertise.com, Adbusters
is surprisingly well laid out and arranged. Unfortunately, the website
clearly takes a back seat to the print magazine and could be used
far more effectively and designed to be far more interactive to facilitate
demonstrations in both physical, virtual, and print spaces. Additionally,
the entire collection of information on Adbusters is not particularly
large, and could be expanded with new protest information, corporate
information, or examples of "hacked" media.