Editing Adbusters (section)

===Anti-advertising===
Adbusters describes itself as anti-advertising: it blames advertising for playing a central role in creating and maintaining consumer culture. This argument is based on the premise that the advertising industry goes to great effort and expense to associate desire and identity with commodities.  Adbusters believes that advertising has unjustly "colonized" public, discursive and psychic spaces, by appearing in movies, sports and even schools, so as to permeate modern culture.<ref name="ReferenceA" /> Adbusters's stated goals include combating the negative effects of advertising and empowering its readers to regain control of culture, encouraging them to ask "Are we consumers and citizens?"<ref>[Marnie W. Curry-Tash, "The Politics of Teleliteracy and Adbusting in the Classroom", ''English Journal'' 87(1), 1998]</ref>

Since ''Adbusters'' concludes that advertising conditions people to look to external sources, to define their own personal identities, the magazine advocates a "natural and authentic self apart from the consumer society".<ref name="ReferenceA" /> The magazine aims to provoke anti-consumerist feelings. By juxtaposing text and images, the magazine attempts to create a means of raising awareness and getting its message out to people that is both aesthetically pleasing and entertaining.<ref name="depts.washington.edu">{{cite web|url=http://depts.washington.edu/gcp/pdf/culturejamsandmemewarfare.pdf |title="Culture Jams and Meme Warfare: Kalle Lasn, Adbusters, and media activism", Wendi Pickerel, Helena Jorgensen, and Lance Bennett, 19 April 2002|access-date=29 March 2014}}</ref>

Activism also takes many other forms such as corporate boycotts and 'art as protest', often incorporating humor.  This includes billboard modifications, [[google bombing]], [[flash mobs]] and fake parking tickets for [[SUVs]].  A popular example of cultural jamming is the distortion of [[Tiger Woods]]' smile into the form of the [[Nike, Inc.|Nike]] swoosh, calling viewers to question how they view Woods' persona as a product. ''Adbusters'' calls it "trickle up" activism, and encourages its readers to do these activities by honoring culture jamming work in the magazine. In the September/October 2001 "Graphic Anarchy" issue, Adbusters were culture jammed themselves in a manner of speaking: they hailed the work of Swiss graphic designer [[Ernst Bettler]] as "one of the greatest design interventions on record", unaware that Bettler's story was an elaborate [[hoax]].