Corporate Flash Dance?

 In my opinion, one of the most fascinating realities enabled by the rise of the internet and the culture and community which emerged within it is very different ways it enables such new and subversive forms of protest such as culture jamming. Culture jamming is an especially interesting example because it is essentially an umbrella term for new methods of viewing existing corporate messages within themselves. In reading “Culture Jamming and Meme-based Communication,” I very much liked how the author defined a meme as “the basic unit of communication in culture-jamming.” Memes have always fascinated me for their virility and surprising bursts of creativity, and have always impressed me as indicative of the different standards of communication that exist in the post internet era. And, as Adbusters insists, they do make a very effective forum for challenging the aggressive status quos of dominating corporate advertising. However, I felt a very interesting aspect of this definition is to be seen in the ways that companies have begun to incorporate forms of culture jamming in their own promotion. Take, for example, T-Mobile and their new ‘Life is for sharing’ ad campaign. In this campaign, a major feature was a flash mob of 100 or so trained dancers brought together in the London Underground which ‘spontaneously’ began dancing for a few minutes to music played over the loud speaker. This was, essentially, a sympol of flash mobs being recongnized and consumed by corporations, because the London Underground was home to one of the first large flash mobs, which performed the same thing only without professionals, with portable music devices, and without T-Mobile being thanked at the end of the demonstration. T-Mobile has with this campaign essentially harnessed the power of the meme economy to perpetuate advertisement, hijacking public demonstrations meant to show a different underlying logic and something apart from traditional corporate and official influences.