Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping
Tip of the Hat
Reverend Billy and brethren
Everything they do - preaching, dancing, singing, protesting, entertaining.
Not specified
Listen and read. Rev. Billy was thinking about language use long before I realized it's importance. He and his crew do a beautiful job of turning a language around - specifically religious and corporate marketing language. They do a beautiful job of introducing a paradigm shift in an entertaining way. They take it to the people.
Now I realize that this is not a pure form of framing, but they are doing what needs to be done. Using THEIR language - not a pundits or a corportations, using THEIR concepts and pointing out the hypocrisy and greed of other corporate/political concepts, and making it accessible to anyone walking near them (or those wanting to visit their website). They aren't even against money - just corporations taking over every aspect of our lives.
The Rev=good, AdBusters=not so much
Agreed AdBusters is a downer. That's why Rev Billy is better at it. He entertains and gets you to play along whether or not you are really into it. Then later you think.
I think he is groundbreaking because if you read his responses to people, he really does respond with positive messages and love. They do street theatre and do direct marketing to stop the shopping. They name names and ask people directly not to go there and it isn't a scary picket line.
I think it is important to remember that framing has even more to do with how we think than what we say. Catches phrases and puns likely won't have any sticking power until the seeds of a new way are planted. Talking liberal values comfortably with people comes from being in a place submerged in authenticity. Which means you live your values and in a way, evangelize. I think it is important to think of fun ways to do that. We are in realtime and realworld with problems marching on evryday, not just 20 years from now when we have all of our acdemic liberal language systems and think tanks firmly in place.
New! ABTV
This comment is a repeat of a comment I made at the topically-related framing story http://www.rockridgenation.org/stories/consumer-hedonism
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I'm not sure of the exact relationship between Reverend Billy and AdBusters but you can find a lot of material that deals with materialism of various stripes, excesses of corporate media, modern day memes and value systems, counter-culture politics and philosophy, social activism in the information age and critical analysis of the advertising industry at http://www.adbusters.org You can see a Reverend Billy "short" and other AdBuster TeleVision (ABTV) videos at http://www.adbusters.org/abtv/blog/
AdBusters is an activist/pro-activism site. One of their projects was to produce environmentalism-friendly, union-made anti-corporate branding shoes using labor in Canada and the USA to show that such a thing could be done and still remain competitive with Nike sweatshop labor. http://adbusters.org/metas/corpo/blackspotshoes/home.php They also support an activist network called "culture jammers" to which I once belonged.
Their magazine is a depressing, ad-less exploration of all that is wrong with postmodernistic society in a format that is as slick and as accessible as Wired magazine. It frequently contains brilliant imagery and writings, which is unsurprising because the core of AdBusters seems to be writers and artists from the world of advertising. Even though I stopped subscribing after two years and I seldom found anything "happy" between the covers, I recommend it for at least a "try it for a year once in your life" basis because it employs radically sharp and edgy propoganda that can be instructive to people who are trying to understand techniques for communication.