As we all know, culture jamming is often seen as a form of subertising. People always express their complaint, irony or opinions about the commercial culture. Famous brand names, well-known commercial statements and product images are always used to do culture jamming. Through re-figuring or a little changing the statements or images, culture jamming can produce some ironic or satirical commentary about its origin. There are different ways to do culture jamming such as video, re-figuring brand logo or billboard subertising and this time I would like to use the example of billboard subertising to discuss about the culture jamming.
Nowadays, we can see commercial advertisement everywhere, such as TV ads, internet campaigns, magazine features or major brand billboards on the street. They are not only selling you the products, they are also designed to manipulate people’s thoughts. Many ideologies are generated through the commercial advertisement such as ideal beauty image or consumption.
To me, billboard advertising is the most eyes- catching advertisement since it arouse almost everyone’s attention in the street. From the website that I mentioned above, I would like to talk more about the billboard subvertising no.8 ‘Photoshop on the U-Bahn Line’. There are three famous idols in the poster- Britney Spears, Leona Lewis and Christina Aguilera. In the poster they are in close-up images and they all look gorgeous. However, the poster was added some Adobe Photoshop’s windows into it which has different layers and it immediately became a Photoshop project. This kind of culture jamming is telling people that all of the advertisement character are always edited before and what we see can be defined as a ‘lie’ since they are originally not that perfect.
In my opinion, not only the examples that I shown above but there is also lots of other advertisements which have the same concept behind it- the ideal beauty image. Think about the Dove youtube video that we seen in the class before. We can always see lots of beautiful girls with perfect faces and body shape in the advertisement. The ideal beauty image- slim, big eyes, white skin, etc. are created in every people’s mind and these advertisements made people chasing for the ideal beauty image. Have we ever thought about the motion behind these advertisements? Companies earn money by creating ideologies.
In my opinion, people do culture jamming with different reasons. Some of them do the culture jamming in their leisure time to express their creation or imagination but some of them do culture jamming to express their resistance to the cultural norms. By not affecting the operation of the society, I think culture jamming is definitely a interesting activities and I would like to see more culture jamming especially billboard subvertising in Hong Kong since during my research it is hard to find some example of billboard subvertising in Hong Kong.
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