Culture jamming ... visits Adbusters, a Vancouver-based campaigning group that combines parody with politics.The viewers of CNN CNN or Cable News Network Subsidiary company of Turner Broadcasting Systems. It was created by Ted Turner in 1980 to present 24-hour live news broadcasts, using satellites to transmit reports from news bureaus around the world. Headline News were in for a bit of a shock. One afternoon last September, amid the channel's standard fare of news bites and ads for cars and mutual funds, this appeared: an animated pig, smacking smack·ing adj. Brisk; vigorous; spanking: a smacking breeze. Noun 1. smacking - the act of smacking something; a blow delivered with an open hand slap, smack its lips, rising out of a map of North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. . `The average North American North American named after North America. North American blastomycosis see North American blastomycosis. North American cattle tick see boophilusannulatus. consumes five times more than a Mexican, ten times more than a Chinese person and thirty times more than a person from India,' said an announcer. Cut to a bulldozer, plowing garbage into a landfill. `We are the most voracious consumers in the world - a world that could die because of how we North Americans live.' Cut to an image of Earth, receding in space. `Give it a rest. September 24th is Buy Nothing Day.' Score another small victory for the adbusters Media Foundation. Since 1989 this group of activists based in Vancouver, on Canada's Pacific coast, has generated dozens of similarly cheeky and provocative messages. And fought to get them onto television screens. As they see it, most TV ads are propaganda for an unsustainable way of life and our media is more interested in selling that way of life than in discussing ways we can change it. Adbusters tries to beat the big advertisers at their own game - by promoting ideas instead of products. `We're trying to develop a new language of protest,' says Kalle Lasn, one of the group's founders. `Corporations are defining our culture for us. It's time It's Time was a successful political campaign run by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) under Gough Whitlam at the 1972 election in Australia. Campaigning on the perceived need for change after 23 years of conservative (Liberal Party of Australia) government, Labor put forward a for us. It's time for us to take it back.' With that goal in mind the Estonian-born Lasn, 53, publishes Adbusters magazine, a quarterly `journal of the mental environment' exposing advertising practices and offering oddball `culture jamming' strategies. (One recent issue contained a counterfeit coupon for a free hamburger and invited readers to persuade McDonald's employees to accept it.) Between the articles are ad parodies. And even these have created a stir. The makers of Absolut Vodka once threatened to sue Adbusters over a series of spoof ads - one showed the familiar vodka bottle, drooping droop v. drooped, droop·ing, droops v.intr. 1. To bend or hang downward: "His mouth drooped sadly, pulled down, no doubt, by the plump weight of his jowls" from over-indulgence, with the slogan `Absolut Impotence'. But they eventually backed off, realizing that a lawsuit would only give the magazine more publicity. Lasn also makes 30-second, broadcast-quality `subvertisements' like the Buy Nothing Day message but he has trouble convincing TV stations to run them. Last year he sent a dozen of the `uncommercials' he's produced (blasting such things as television addiction Television addiction is a disorder where the subject has a compulsion to watch television. The compulsion can be extremely difficult to control in many cases. It has many parallels to other forms of addiction, such as addiction to drugs or gambling, which create an altered mental and industrial forestry) to the three biggest stations in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. . Though the messages were professionally slick and their claims backed by statistics all three stations turned him down. `Television is the most powerful medium of our time but the average citizen does not have access to it,' claims Lasn. `This pandering to the commercial interest has gone so far that our basic freedom of speech is being violated.' The powers that be will find it more difficult to stop the message of Buy Nothing Day. Last September 24, Buy Nothing Day went international. In Manchester, England, a group called Enough celebrated the date by launching a fake new soft drink called Happiness TM. In the Netherlands activists occupied a shopping mall dressed in rat costumes and urged people to leave the race. It may sound loony but Lasn has even bigger plans in 1996, including a full-page ad in the New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times and the broadcast of another animated pig message in the capitals of all of the G-7 countries. `Western culture has gone berzerk with shopping,' says Lasn. `Buy Nothing Day is the consumer equivalent of meditation. It teaches you something about the impulse to buy that has been so carefully conditioned into us by advertizing.' Breaking the consumer habit won't be easy. At the end of last year's Buy Nothing Day spot on CNN a toll-free telephone number A toll-free, Freecall, Freephone, or 800 number is a special telephone number, in that the called party is charged the cost of the calls by the telephone carrier, instead of the calling party. appeared on-screen on·screen or on-screen adj. & adv. 1. As shown on a movie, television, or display screen. 2. Within public view; in public. and dozens of viewers called to express their opinions. Three-quarters of them were hostile. `You're a bunch of tree-hugging freaks,' said one. `Advertizing is the American way The American way of life is an expression that refers to the "life style" of people living in the United States of America. It is an example of a behavioral modality, developed from the 17th century until today. .' Says Kalle Lasn: `Our mesages goes against the grain of what North Americans have been brought up to believe. But let's face it, neither our consumer culture nor our economic system are sustainable. We're at the beginning of a revolution which is fuelled by a quest for sustainability - a quest to give our children and our children's children the same kinds of opportunities that we have. It requires incredibly hard choices. Now is the time to make them.' |
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