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Greenpeace: A Semiotic Analysis

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On August 25th 2013, Greenpeace (an independent global campaigning organisation that aims to expose the environmental criminal) protested against Shell, a multination petroleum company, in attempt to create an awareness of Shell’s intentions to put in to place an oil drilling plant in the Arctic, a project that could potentially endanger and destroy the environment. The intention of this essay is to discuss how culture jamming works and what its limitations are and also to perform a semiotic analysis of the Shell/Greenpeace video. Culture jamming is known as a mode of resistance to the norms and conventions of mass culture that exposes and goes against the media’s underlying power structures and ideological messages (Klien, 2002). Culture jamming …show more content…

The main objectives of culture jamming often incorporates consciousness raising, the raising awareness of social and political issues, as well as using the media to criticise the media and dominate culture (O’Shaughnessy and Stadler, 2012, 214). Culture jamming, for a very long time, has been the main means of strategy to oppose and slow down what is perceived as a dehumanizing, and thus problematic, global trend. This master plan, which involves exposing what is “behind the brand” (frequently labour exploitation), is based on re-representing logos of companies that conjure the brand with new and conflicting representations (Brown, 1). Culture jamming aims to promote change by making consumers aware of the contradictions of corporations’ policies and practises as well as making them aware of their own consumer choices (Micheletti, Stolle, Follesdal, 2006, 136). It does so in a humorous way with the intention of provoking a positive reaction rather than a negative one. It targets corporations by making use of their own market against them and using their own jargon, logos, corporate image. Culture jamming puts a new spin on things or events as it alters the …show more content…

Greenpeace video. Culture jamming is a powerful tool that media can use to make us, as consumers, aware of issues that those that are the hegemony do not want us knowing. It allows us to question and hopefully change our view point of the products are brands we use, by exposing the actions behind the brand, such as endangering the environment. Culture jamming enables us as to challenge the dominate group and their ideologies, and hopefully allow us become conscious consumers and not just accept what we see.

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