The Message Behind The Picture

If you see this picture as just a simple mother breastfeeding her baby and nothing more, you aren’t seeing the message in the picture. This picture serves as a much deeper message to the amount of advertisements that are taking in; starting as young as months old. It is a shocking realization that even babies are being exposed to the same amount of advertisements.

I had no idea what culture jamming was until Ian explained it in class. He explained culture jamming as taking an ad and subverting the meaning and radically changing the meaning intended. In the case of this ad, the mother breastfeeding her child became a symbolic ad for the reality that parents help to feed the advertisements to their children, we are exposed from the minute we are born. This ad wants people to remember the next time they breastfeed a child or see a women breastfeeding, they want them to realize the amount everyone is consuming.

Scott McCloud explains through comics how a simple image can mean so much more. “Comics can be maddeningly vague about what it shows us. By showing little or nothing of a given scene—and offering only clues to the reader—the artist can trigger any number of images in the reader’s imagination” (McCloud, 86). What he is basically saying is that you make a simple picture mean a 1000 words. You don’t have to ramble on and on in an article about the consumption of advertisements; you can simply make a picture with no words but those on the company logos. The point of ads and using culture jamming is to embed messages in people’s mind by using familiarly images.

As I was reading other people’s blogs, I found a common theme among them. A lot of people believe that culture jamming often insults current issues or demeans them. The reality of the situation is that they bring a powerful message to people; more often than not it says what most people won’t. The problem to me is people don’t want to accept the truth or reality of the issues at hand.

Nowadays people don’t have the time to sit down and read articles upon articles about important issues in the news. Culture jamming is a way in which people can understand a current issue with a little humour. According to Roland Barthes in Mythologies he explains, “...pictures, to be sure, are more imperative than writing, the impose meaning at one stroke, without analysing or diluting it...pictures become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful...”(Barthes, 110). It takes only seconds to process the image and to understand the meaning it is trying to portray. Culture jamming is broadening our views on important issues.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 1. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. 1st. New York, USA: HarperPerennial, 1994