Visual and Textual Rhetoric on Adbusters.org

Beth Fratkin

University of Utah

The current social and political climate may be one in which segments of our society are open to the discussion of media reform and citizens from all over the world are forming grassroots organizations and coalitions devoted to producing alternative media (Atton, 2002; Bagdikian, 2000; Engelman, 1996; McChesney, 1999).  Many of these groups have found that new channels of communication accessible by the Internet have spurred the development of forums for the exchange of information among like-minded individuals and organizations (Coopman, 1999).  Other groups like Adbusters.org have used the multimedia capacity of the Internet to create entirely new hybrid forms of media. Adbusters is a nonprofit media foundation that describes itself as "a loose coalition of media reform activists who are devoted to nothing less than changing the world" (Lasn, 1999, p. xi).

Other media activists have attempted to change the world in the past, but now new technology really does have the potential to threaten the traditional business models of commercial media and to change the way we think about mass media (Rheingold, 1993). For citizens who envision the possibility of enacting genuine media reform, this age of new technology offers enormous promise (Bagdikian, 2000; Negroponte, 1996). For researchers who wish to study how people use new technologies to further their communication goals, web sites such as the one maintained by offer a multimedia context for examination.

However, Adbusters.org is more than just a site that facilitates the exchange of information, it is also a site where people can actively participate in an electronic community that allows them to create the alternative forms of media that they envision (Adbusters, 2002; Lasn, 1999). This site allows anyone to make media, and while the site is moderated by Lasn, its founder, the premise that anyone can produce media that can be distributed over a worldwide network of communication is radical in and of itself (Atton, 2002). This web site also contains images that represent the philosophy of the Adbusters community, and while the graphical interface on Adbusters.org is somewhat conventional in terms of layout, the images, and the content contained in the images, employ innovative juxtapositions that encourages viewers to consider alternative interpretations of everyday practices that many of us tend to perform by rote.

Lasn (1999), a former advertising executive who later became a documentary filmmaker focused on environmental issues, asserts that the structure of mass media in this country is designed to encourage mass consumption. Lasn sees this as a practice that is responsible for destroying our environment, destroying our mental health, and destroying our political system. But Lasn does not believe that there is any reason why media cannot be re-deployed to promote a more ecological and equitable way of life.

As stated earlier, one of the goals of Adbusters.org is to get people to think about aspects of their lives that they might normally perform automatically (Adbusters.org, 2002; Lasn, 1999). One of the ways in which the organization attempts to realize this goal is by practicing what it refers to as culture jamming.  A culture jammer is someone who creates a space where ordinary understandings of media become so extraordinary that one is required to stop and try and reinterpret the meaning of the message at the point of consumption. Many of the images on Adbusters.org are satirical. Others can be compared to the work of installation artists who take ordinary household items and place them into such unusual contexts that viewers are forced to recreate the meaning of the common or found objects (Solso, 1997).

For example, on one page, an ordinary image of a coke can is transformed into an image of the bible by using a rollover design feature (Adbusters.org, 2000). Another example of a common image that has been effectively co-opted by the Adbusters site is demonstrated on a prominently displayed banner that is designed to look like the standard American flag. Except the Adbusters flag has 50 instantly recognizable corporate logos placed in the field where the stars would normally be (Adbuster.org, 2002).

Another aspect of the Adbusters site that is worthy of further investigation is the dynamic that creates a sense of community for visitors to this site.  People join or consider themselves to be members of communities for various reasons, but one of the most important reasons for participating in an electronic forum like Adbusters is because it creates a the sense of belonging for the people who are dedicated to promoting a common cause (Agre, 1998; Atton, 2002).  In this sense, Adbusters provides participants with a philosophy to live by, a way to formulate an identity based on a higher purpose than individual self-interest. Joining a group of this type may allow individuals to feel a sense of empowerment through their collective membership .At this initial stage of inquiry, it appears that this dynamic motivates people to actually participate in organized, off-line political and social activism (Adbusters, 2002). If people are indeed motivated to action by this web site, the results of this proposed study may potentially have important ramifications for those who wish to promote social change.

This paper proposal then, is based on the premise that the Adbusters.org site may be able to provide a model for creating a community of activists who are sometimes motivated to move from the virtual world to the material one by employing visual rhetoric that works in tandem with other aspects of the text to create a unique site for the study of an alternative to conventional forms of mass media. This proposed method of analysis for this study is textual, with a specific emphasis on the use of ideographic images.

Research Question 1. In what ways does Adbusters.org facilitate the exchange of information between community members?

Research Question 2. In what ways does Adbusters.org promote its goals through the design features on its web site e?

Research Question 3. In what ways are visual and textual ideographs used to subvert mainstream media and popular culture imagery on the Adbusters.org web site?

When scholars first began to write about the Internet, there was a binary trend in the literature. On one end of the spectrum there were scholars such as Carey (1998) who asserted that there is nothing new under the sun and that all of the hoopla about the Internet is just another example of the hype that is generated over any new development in communication technology. But then, on the other end of the spectrum, you had people like Rheingold (1993) who wrote about homesteading the electronic frontier as if the Internet is equivalent to the dawning of the new Age of Aquarius. It may be too early to come to any definitive conclusions about the Internet and the ways in which people use it yet, but the following review attempts to present a representative sample of the literature that will inform my study of the Adbusters web site.

First of all, in his book Culture jam: The uncooling of America, Lasn (1999) critiques the culture of consumption that he calls America. ™ For Lasn, American™ is a global culture created by multinational cultural industries that have destroyed any sense of authenticity in modern life. The first part of the book is a critique of the "post-modern hall of mirrors" that Lasn claims obscures our ability to understand the destructive nature of modern life (Lasn, 1999, p. xvi). He offers several examples of how this works in our everyday lives and claims that we are all victims of a media induced trance.

The second half of Lasn’s (1999) book is devoted to motivating readers to join what he calls a new revolutionary movement. Lasn is convinced that if enough people join the movement to create a culture of opposition to post-modern life by employing methods that jam the culture, that Adbusters can change the world. Lasn traces the beginning of this movement back to the French Situationalists in the 1960s who argued that a perspective jarring event can compel you to experience a detounment, or a turnabout your everyday life. While Lasn’s argument is not written for an academic audience, it is supported by references from academic and popular journals. This book is designed to inspire potential activists who are looking for creative ways to spur social change. The assumption of Lasn, and hence the assumption of the foundation, is that if enough people can be persuaded to think about the destructive habits of everyday life in North America, they will surely adjust their behavior accordingly.

While Lasn’s (1999) methods and use of his chosen medium may be innovative and couched in counter-cultural posturing, the underlying assumption that humans are essentially rational human beings who act according to rational arguments is not a radical departure for those who subscribe to Habermas’ approach to the public sphere.

In The media and the public sphere, Garnham (1997) discusses the idealized public sphere and how it relates to mediated communication. Granham’s essay asserts that communication scholars have traditionally ignored the problem of participation when studying mass media and he argues that we should think more about mass media as a public sphere. This is exactly what Lasn (1999) is suggesting that we do. While many authors such as Morley (2000) and Fraser (1997) criticize the Habermasian vision of the public sphere as being elitist and exclusionary, any philosophical ideal will be open to the constraints that operate in the material world. Garnham’s suggestion that we need a conception of an ideal in order to expand and critique existing forms of media. Garnham also clearly defines how his vision for participatory democracy might work, and how media can work to define community.

Atton’s (2002) book on alternative media attempts to expand traditional understandings of the genre, and attempts to create a theoretical model for alternative and radical media as a field of cultural production. Atton begins by creating his theoretical stance with a thorough review of literature within the realm of cultural studies, mass media, and computer-mediated communication. The Birmingham School approach to cultural studies clearly influences Atton’s theorizing and this book provides a useful framework for looking at Adbusters.org as a site of cultural production. The remainder of Atton’s book is devoted to the economics and how this type of media builds identity, and how it can help to build social movements. Atton concludes that people who participate in the production of alternative media are creating public spheres free from the constraints of traditional media, and are therefore contributing to the creation of a more democratic society in the process. This book is extremely relevant to my study because it directly addresses social activism on web sites as distinct forms of mass media.

In Electronic democracy: Using the Internet to transform American politics, Browning (2001) adopts a pragmatic approach for activists who want to reach their political representatives online. This book is written by a newspaper reporter who also served as the editorial director of the Internet Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. It is basically a "how to" guide for using the Internet as a tool for grassroots political organizing. Since the book is written for a popular audience, it offers many concrete and successful examples of how the Internet has been used to provide increased political access to politicians and other activists. The book also contains an extensive list of web sites maintained by political and public service organizations. This book offers a more conventional approach to political participation than others do, but it also offers support for a positive perspective on the potential of the Internet for ordinary citizens who want to participate more actively in government and the public sphere.

Coopman, (1999) an activist in the microradio movement discusses how the Internet allowed media activists involved in the Low Power FM movement to exchange information and create a network for communicating via the Internet. This article provides concrete examples of how geographically dispersed activists were able to unite for a common cause over the Internet.

It is important to remember that many scholars question the ability of the Internet to create any type of meaningful change, or who raise questions about the more utopian visions of the Internet that have dominated the debate until recently. For example, Carey (1998) expresses his ambivalence about the new medium in the title of his piece, The Internet and the end of the national communication system: Uncertain predictions of an uncertain future. Carey takes the position that the rhetoric surrounding any form of new media always contains metaphors that link transportation with new communication technologies. He predicts that the Internet will succumb to the same type of progressive differentiation that other commercial forms of mass media have in the past. This is an important argument to consider for anyone studying online community from a mass communication perspective. The weight of history bears out the logic of his argument, but the technological determinism approach may be a dead end simply because it may be impossible for any entity, no matter how powerful, to control all the portals of entry to this new technology.

McChesney’s (1999) approach to the Internet is similar to Carey’s. In Rich media, poor democracy: Communication politics in dubious times, McChesney makes a forceful argument that states since multinational corporations have now taken over the vast majority of mass media outlets across the globe, it is just a matter of time until those corporations come to control access to the Internet. Therefore McChesney claims that any visions of creating a more participatory form of democracy via the Internet or any other new form of technology, is impossible at this late stage of capitalism. But the most interesting thing about this book is that a few faint notes of hope manage to creep into McChesney’s narrative when he talks about the potential of the Internet. McChesney also devotes a chapter to political activism in dubious times like ours.

Davis (1999) also takes a cynical approach to the potential of the Internet. This book, written by a political science professor from BYU, offers a negative view of the potential for cultivating a more democratic public sphere on the Internet. According to Davis, who is writing about the traditional political arena, the Internet has already been taken over by the entrenched power structure. The other reason why Davis does not believe that Internet provides any increased potential for political participation is because Davis does not think that the medium is an adequate tool for political involvement. Davis’ arguments are based on online interviews, content analysis, and survey research. His basic reasoning is that the web is too confusing for the average user to negotiate without consulting the gatekeepers that control all other forms of media. Davis also asserts that the web is unreliable, time consuming, and that it requires technical literacy and financial resources that many citizens do not have. Obviously, citizens are capable of negotiating the technical obstacles of the Internet if they are motivated enough to do so. It does not take a political scientist to discover the populist potential of the new medium.

Bakardjieva & Feenburg (2002) explore some of the major theoretical debates surrounding the definition and concept of virtual communities in this article. The authors review major themes in the literature, and express skepticism over those who may be overly enthusiastic about the abilities of this new form of media to create long-lasting, stable communities. But the authors also argue that those who adopt a more traditional approach to technological criticism also tend to ignore the potential that the Internet has to offer for the formation of virtual communities with less stable values. However, this essay concludes by recommending that researchers direct their focus toward the creation of software and design features that would provide a better platform to support virtual community values. Bakardjieva & Feenburg also argue that it is possible to dispose of the consumption model of media online, but that it will take imagination and political mobilization to do so. This article will be extremely useful for my research because the authors distill most of the major arguments that work to support or refute the concept of virtual communities.

There are many other scholars who have theorized the possibilities of community on the Internet, and some that have asked if the concept of community should be applied to the Internet at all. Kolko & Reid (1998) examine some of the problems that occur when virtual communities fail by detailing the history of a MOO group for media researchers as a case study. The authors advance the claim that the types of breakdowns in the community that they studied are related to "self, space and the role of place within rhetoric" (Kolko & Reid, 1998, p. 226). Furthermore, they assert that the body politic is as fragmented as is the Internet and the society it represents

In Information, Internet, and community: Notes toward an understanding of community in an information, Jones (1998) offers an excellent overview of the questions and issues involved with framing virtual communities and he provides a fairly comprehensive review of the existing literature. The value of this chapter and other articles that I have read by Jones is in his ability to provide differing perspectives on many aspects of doing research on the Internet. His ability to pose provocative questions is valuable, despite the fact that he does not seem to have many answers.

In At the heart of it all: The concept of presence, Lombard & Ditton (1997) assert that a number of emerging new technologies are designed to provide users with the illusion that their experience is not being mediated. The authors call this illusion the perception of presence. They define presence as social richness, realism, as transportation, immersion, as the feeling of being a social actor within the medium and when the medium itself is a social factor. The authors then go on to describe how different aspects of interface design and visual characteristics contribute to this illusion. While Lombard & Ditton are faculty members in at Temple University in the Telecommunication department, they use a psychoanalytic framework for their analysis of computer-mediated communication. They suggest that people receive some kind psychic gratification as a result of their participation in online communities.

Solso (1997) wrote an intriguing book about visual cognition, how we see images, and how our brain interprets them. The first part of the book is devoted to the actual way our brains process visual information and how our eyes perceive it. Solso relies on cognitive psychology for this part of the book, and then he discusses how art history developed as we gained a better understanding of cognition. Solso demonstrates how our understanding of cognition has influenced the history of art in the Western world. While this book does not address how we perceive images on the Internet, it does offer a creative theoretical base for the interpretation of art online. Since one component of this study includes the analysis of visual rhetoric on the Adbusters web site, Solso’s perspective will be invaluable.

This literature review is by no means comprehensive Instead it was written to demonstrate the scope of the literature that I will explore in the event that my study proposal is accepted. The actual study will surely encompass a more specific focus as the study progresses.

It is always difficult to select a perfect method for any given site of study, and a proposal to study a web site carries with it its own unique set of variables. Many new media researchers have chosen to use adapt quantitative research methods used to study more traditional forms of media to their online studies. For example, Papacharissi’s (2002) study of the utility of personal web pages combines survey research and content analysis in order to determine how selected variables influence the way people use and design their web pages. While Papacharissi’s methodology allows her to answer questions related to why people create personal web pages, and why people would want to expend the effort to create them in the first place, the methodology used for this study cannot address questions relating to the characteristics of the communication itself.        

Mann and Stewart (2002) outline some positive and negative aspects of using qualitative methods to study computer-mediated communication such as focus groups, questionnaires, and interviewing to study computer-mediated communication in their book, but a more promising approach for this specific project is touched on in their chapter describing how power relationships can influence the characteristics of communication over the Internet.  The authors bring up the Habermasian concept of the public sphere as a framework for the analysis of communication over the Internet. While Mann & Stewart do not suggest that an ideal public sphere can be created over the Internet, they do suggest that textual analysis can be used to reveal the ideology that exists within all communication exchanges.

Barthes (1995) does not specifically address semiotics as a method in Mythologies, but it can be inferred that Barthes’ concept of myth is also concerned with revealing the power structures that are contained within any given piece of text. And it is fair to say that Bathes’ myths can contain visual rhetoric as well as written or spoken text.  A closely related rhetorical method of analysis is offered in McGee’s (1980) concept of the ideograph. McGee asserts that certain phrases or expressions can be categorized according to the residue left by the power relationships that are represented within them. Accordingly, certain words, or in the case of this study, certain components of text, context, and images, contain unquestioned political assumptions that reify the power structure and organize communal behavior. McGee argues, and I agree, that these ideographic terms are problematic because we use them without abstracting them to the material world. This theory of textual analysis will surely be an appropriate method to use to extract the meaning of the communication on a web site dedicated to thwarting common American ideographs and dedicated to turning our cultural assumptions upside down.

The following example will illustrate my approach to the analysis of the visual and textual rhetoric on Adbusters.org (2002). Earlier in this proposal, I sited the image of an ordinary Coke can that became a bible with a mouse-over design feature that is featured on the Adbusters web site. In a different context, if a person saw an image of a Coke, she might "read" it as a shorthand image, or an ideograph, that brings to mind a certain sense of youthful energy and exuberance that is usually linked to an all-American lifestyle. When faced with an image of a bible, a typical American might associate it with God, church, or religious faith. However, when these two images are viewed together, one might see the Coke can as a symbol of a multinational corporation dedicated to the proposition that promoting mass consumption of their product is as holy to the corporation, as the bible is to the American Judeo-Christian belief system.   The Adbusters.org site contains dozens of pages that contain potential units for analysis, but the page that I am most interested in is the page that contains 11 icons that represent Adbusters campaigns. Each icon becomes a slide show that describes, for example, what TV Turnoff Week is, or why there is a photograph of a man the man with an oil mustache on the Got Oil? campaign icon. The page containing the campaigns icons, and the slide shows that they reveal, provide self-contained units for analysis that are clearly designed to communicate the goals of the organization.

Additionally, I intend to monitor the contents of the bulletin board on Adbusters.org for a period of one month in order to provide additional data that will support the textual analysis of the campaign page. There are six active (more than six posts a day) moderated, discussion topics that are loosely organized around the issues addressed on the campaign page. After monitoring this discussion board informally over the last two months, I think that the bulletin board discussion s will enrich the analysis of the campaign pages and provide support for the assumption that Adbusters.org is a virtual community. Since all posts are anonymous, and are intended to promote public discussions, I do not anticipate any ethical problems that are beyond the scope of the Institutional Review Board.

The Adbusters.org web site contains a rich environment for the study of how a virtual community communicates its political and social agenda to itself and to visitors to the organization’s web site. The contributing designers of the Adbusters.org web site consciously attempt to juxtaposition jarring textual and visual imagery to promote their communication goals and therefore this study will provide analysis that will make a contribution to the field.

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