Sunday, January 20, 2008

Week 2 – Cobb, Chapter 2

I feel like there is a whole ‘chasing each other’s tail” situation going on here.
As a rough outline, on one side the ‘media world’ is constantly trying to stretch out to a broader population, adapting itself to diverse subcultures to get their attention, and on the other side some specific subcultures trying to find an identity, a cultural independence from popular culture, sometimes trying to escape from it or to use it for their own purposes.

I don’t know how ‘popular’ braconnage is in the USA. In France it seemed to be a rather common thing. There is actually a whole organization revolving around this idea: ‘Les Casseurs de Pub’ (literally, ‘Ad Breakers’ or ‘Ad Rioter’– http://casseursdepub.org ).
They will organize events, post stickers and posters across cities in one night or add a few words to actual commercials to change the meaning, to try and make people aware of the dangers of consumerism and dehumanization.
I’ll have to look back into it.

3 comments:

Brian said...

Ah, so you have some familiarity with clandestine counter-marketing; did you participate in this braconnage in France?

amy said...

America has AdBusters and underground communities that do a lot of adverse marketing, revealing and questioning marketing status quo. They have a website:
www.adbusters.com

They are behind the Buy Nothing Day phenomenom as well as Turning off the TV day or something like that. It's really interesting.

At the end of the day I don't know how useful it is and how healthy it promotes their message. They are pretty destructive but I guess what do you do when an ads messages are pretty destructive?

Unknown said...

good work this week simon. be sure to do classmate responses each week as well.