THE YES MEN AND ACTIVISM IN THE INFORMATION ... - Index of

the children who see the ads every day, to create a dialogue not only between himself, as artist,
and the billboard, but also between marketing campaigns and their targets. De Gerada wishes to
thwart the one-way distributive mode of advertising. He wants to instigate community
discussion about what corporations are selling: do the people want to buy it? De Gerada feels
there are options to be considered that most people never knew they had. His works are ways of
opening peoples’ eyes to something they might not have realized before, namely that they have a
choice. 95
Culture jamming is defined by Naomi Klein, author of No Logo (a book considered by
many to be the manifesto of the anti-globalization movement), as “the practice of parodying
advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their images.” 96 Klein’s
definition, while limited, addresses the goal of culture jamming, which rejects the idea that
marketing and all propaganda “must be passively accepted as a one-way information flow.” 97 In
order to create the needed dialogue about what advertising actually means to communities, De
Gerada alters the billboards in his neighborhood in New York. Klein’s definition, however, does
not emphasize the use of satire, a very important part of culture jamming and its acceptance by
its target audiences. Tim Jordan and Paul A. Taylor propose instead that “culture jamming
engages directly with media noise and combines . . . direct action and satire” to frustrate the codes
95 Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001), 279-80.
96 Ibid, 280.
97 Ibid, 281.
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