“You Can't Run Your SUV on Cute. Let's Go!”: Internet Memes As
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Environmental Communication, 2016 Vol. 10, No. 1, 62–83, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2014.991411 “You Can’t Run Your SUV on Cute. Let’s Go!”: Internet Memes as Delegitimizing Discourse Corey B. Davis, Mark Glantz & David R. Novak In an effort to explore the role of new media technologies in environmental protest rhetoric, this paper examines Greenpeace’s Let’s Go! Arctic campaign, which opposed Shell’s Arctic oil-drilling plans. The campaign produced a body of Internet memes designed to look like Shell’s own corporate advertising. Moreover, the viral campaign used various rhetorical techniques that challenged Shell’s goals and identity. Green- peace-generated and user-generated memes cleverly use irony, corporate voice and humor to delegitimize Shell’s Arctic efforts. The memes offered messages that mocked corporate practices and corporate messaging while also providing direct protest messages and accessible humor that invited identification against Shell. Thus, the memes collectively encouraged identification with Greenpeace’s antidrilling, pro- environment discourse. Keywords: legitimacy; delegitimize; Internet; memes; Greenpeace; Shell oil On 27 February 2013, Royal Dutch Shell (Shell) announced “a pause in their Alaska drilling program” (Shell, 2013, np). Despite starting their Arctic drilling plan in 2012, “a series of costly and embarrassing accidents in its efforts to drill exploratory wells” (Broder, 2013, np) caused Shell to suspend their Arctic drilling activities for 2013. However, according to a spokesperson Shell “remains committed to building an Arctic exploration program that provides confidence to stakeholders and regulators, and meets the high standards the company applies to its operations around the world,” (Shell, 2013, np). Drilling into the untapped Arctic oil reserves remains a Corey B. Davis is Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA. Mark Glantz is Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies, St. Norbert College, USA. David R. Novak is Assistant Professor, School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Correspondence to: Corey B. Davis, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, 800 W. Main Street, Whitewater, WI 53190-1790, USA. Email: [email protected] © 2015 Taylor & Francis Let’s Go! 63 major geopolitical and climate change issue. And despite the apparent desire for Shell to continue its Arctic drilling program, 2013’s pause was a win for environmental activists. As key parts of this particular debate occurred online, this is a pertinent and timely issue for furthering understanding of online communication and climate change. Harold (2004) demonstrated the importance and potency of cultural pranking, but the rhetorical and material implications of culture jamming and social protest media have remained relatively unexplored. More specifically, since Harold’s essay, there are new popular trends in social media and online social protest, particularly memes. Arguably, we can trace these contemporary pranksters back to the work of Adbusters and others. Kalle Lasn (2000), the founder and publisher of Adbusters magazine and website, and an architect of culture jamming claims jammers: are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators, and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century. We believe culture jamming can be to our era what civil rights was to the ‘60s, what feminism was to the ‘70s, what environmental activism was to the ‘80s. It will alter the way we live and think. It will change the way information flows, the way institutions wield power, the way TV stations are run, the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music, and culture industries set their agendas. Above all, it will change the way meaning is produced in our society. (p. 64) Given the widespread presence of online pranking and increasingly easy online interactivity, Internet-based protest and disruption campaigns bear further examina- tion. In this case, we argue that Greenpeace and corporate pranksters The Yes Men employed irony, mock corporate speak, and humor to delegitimize not only Shell’s Arctic drilling efforts but also their corporate messaging about the viability of Arctic drilling. The Let’s Go! Arctic campaign was launched in June 2012 by Greenpeace, an environmental advocacy organization in association with The Yes Men, an organization that is part public relations, part consultancy, and part social pranksters. The hoax advertising campaign was launched during a staged press conference at Seattle’s Space Needle. Initially, the campaign’s planners succeeded in attracting media attention and public ridicule, directed at Shell, from news outlets such as Gawker.com’s Gizmodo blog (Holiday, 2012) and International Business Times News (Parades, 2012), who reported on the Arctic Ready website as well as the “failed” PR stunt, under the assumption that Shell was the originator. Twitter users and influential journalists were similarly fooled (Hill, 2012). As observers caught on to the prank, reporters and bloggers, such as Mondaq Business Briefing (Heenan Blaikie, 2012), lauded Greenpeace and The Yes Men as having “struck oil” (np). Melbourne newspaper, The Age, described the prank as “a social media oil spill” (Moses, 2012, p. 3). Hill (2012), writing for Forbes, observed, “Greenpeace has apparently discovered that it’s far more effective to ram Shell online than it is to send Greenpeace boats out to protest or to handcuff themselves to drilling equipment in the snow” (np). 64 C. B. Davis et al. Perhaps more impressive than the popular press attention that the campaign garnered was the level at which Greenpeace and The Yes Men successfully motivated stakeholders to participate. Less than two weeks after the campaign began, on 8 June 2012, visitors to the Arctic Ready site (www.arcticready.com) had created over 8800 images. Just as pranksters such as the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO) and the Truth campaign mobilized their publics to engage in pranks (Harold, 2004), the Let’s Go! Arctic campaign got its audiences to participate, and as a result, protest Shell through meme creation. However, social media allowed Greenpeace’s Let’s Go! Arctic campaign to spread more quickly, more expansively, and at a lower cost than BLO or Truth could ever have dreamed, even a decade ago. Further, the Internet affords antagonists like Greenpeace the capacity to convincingly create an online presence in the guise of their targets. Such e-campaigns are revolutionizing the ways activist groups engage in protest movements. In the following sections of this essay, we review literature on legitimacy and memes that are relevant to our analysis of the Let’s Go! Arctic campaign. Next, we detail the case and the memes under scrutiny. Following that, we proceed with our analysis of 10 organization-generated and 16 user-generated memes related to the Let’s Go! Arctic campaign. Literature Review What makes an organization a “legitimate” social entity? What counts as “legitimate” and “illegitimate?” How does legitimacy get negotiated, uprooted, and questioned? An examination of the literature on legitimacy helps us answer some of these questions and to understand the nuances of where and how online environmental protest fits into these broader questions of social legitimacy. Multiple disciplines, including sociology, organization science, and management, have applied various approaches in the study of legitimacy. The subsequent review focuses on the approaches to legitimacy research that best inform our current application. The development of legitimacy theory is rooted in the context of politics (Boyd, 2000). Who gets to participate in public debate? Who does not? What issues are up for debate, and what arguments are fair game in deciding those issues? For example, much of Habermas’ work considers the means by which political actors gain legitimacy in the public sphere. For Habermas, justification is an important element of legitimacy (Goodnight, 2008). To justify their actions, organizations, political or otherwise, must provide evidence that their actions are warranted and have merit. Organizations that stray from providing justifications for their actions are likely to lose legitimacy (Goodnight, 2008) with many potential consequences. Legitimacy theory has been applied in many different contexts: for example, corporate contexts (e.g., Carl, 2004; Grolin, 1998; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001) and even the intersection of political and corporate contexts, as in the case of state-owned enterprises (Roper & Schoenberger-Orgad, 2011). Such research concludes that modern corporations are increasingly accountable to more stakeholders, requiring innovative commitments to maintaining a reputation of legitimacy. A body of work Let s Go! 65 on impression management also informs the study of legitimacy. Schlenker (1980), building on earlier work by Scott and Lyman (1968) and Goffman (1971), provided important early contributions, offering different varieties of “accounts” as a way to lessen the “apparent severity of [a] predicament” (p. 136). More specific and contemporary studies of impression management and issues management have intersected with legitimacy in corporate contexts (e.g., Coombs, 1992; Heath, 2001, 2006). Coombs argued that organizations that fail to