Does Adbusters really get anyone to think?

 Though I'm new to Adbusters, the Vancouver-based, anti-consumerist magazine, I'm familiar with its strategies. Its spoof ads, such as Chemo Joe or the Calvin Klein Obsession series, have become almost common place among media and pop culture circles. Adbuster images take the same slick fonts and graphics corporate advertisers use and manipulate the images to create new, contradictory meanings.

The whole point, argues Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, is to "stop the flow of spectacle long enough to adjust your set" ("Culture Jamming," 1999, p. 418). That is, by altering familiar images, Adbusters interrupts the expected, usual way we receive mediated messages and allows consumers the opportunity to reevaluate what they're seeing. This tactic, known as "culture jamming" is founded on the work of French Situationalists, those beatnik revolutionaries who decried the over-consumption of public living and revived Dadaist tactics in the 1950s and 60s. The idea of culture jamming is that, like a saboteur might throw a wrench in the cogs of a mill to stop its output, parodying familiar media texts sabotages the consumerist rhetoric. Indeed, describing themselves as neo-situationlists, adbusters details in its Culture Jamming Manifesto its attempts to bring "image factories" of pop-culture marketeers to a "sudden, shuddering halt" (evolutionzone.com).

More specifically, Adbusters employs the Situationalist strategy of détournement in its parodies. Détournement, as defined by Internationale Situationniste, is a way to "detour," or divert, popular images and messages. Détournement sabotages those images offered up by the Spectacle and challenges publics to think for themselves.

Of course, détournement is only an meaningful strategy when used appropriately. Situationalists Guy Debord and Gil Wolman explain that "[d]étournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and least effective" (See: A User's Guide to Détournement, 1956, available online through Situationalist International Anthology at bopsecrets.org). That is, the culture jammer should leave the audience to fill in some of the blanks. Rather than telling a public "The messages you're receiving are wrong," proper détournement should intentionally be surprising, confusing, or vague to encourage active reflection.

Adbusters, however, seems to offer only negative critique. The "Adbuster spoofs oversimplify the dynamic relationship we have with media images" (40), explains Christine Harold in Ourspace. Rather than providing its audience with a chance to think critically and rationally about the media images it consumes, Adbusters seems to smugly point out the mistakes big media producers make. It "self-righteous outsider stance" (Harold, p. 53) even goes so far as to alientate its audience as it offers what appears to be little more than a glorified public service announcement. Today's media consumer, having grown up with a deluge of advertisements from a variety of sources, can see the one-sidedness of Adbuster spoofs. The "subvertisements" don't offer a chance for critical evaluation. They don't suggest revolution, and they don't really say anything.

Sure, it's unusual to see Joe Camel stricken with cancer and lying in the ICU. But is there anyone who didn't already know smoking is harmful to your health?