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This is like the modern equivalent of the Max Headroom signal hijacking. Bizarre mashups of tech, television and corporate icons. It's definitely a form of culture jamming.

...except this time it's literally just marketing material for a giant corporation hawking junk food. The opposite of culture jamming, I guess.

The guy that named gifs may insist on a soft g, but he’s obviously wrong or a troll because graphic isn’t pronounced /jrafik/, and everyone other than a few pedants pronounce it the correct way.

Similarly, Kalle Lasn‘s perspective was limited by ideology when he coined “culture jamming”. The term’s usage has expanded to encompass a wider range of mashups, thumbs-in-eyes, and appropriations than what its creator intended, and is frequently used in ways that raises the hackles of old school readers of Adbusters.

In some ways its modern usage has become a meta-commentary on itself.

but he’s obviously wrong or a troll

He once made this assertion while standing in front of a PowerPoint slide that read "It's pronounced 'JIF' not 'GIF'".

It has to be a troll, because no-one smart enough to invent the format is going to look at that slide and go "yep, this strengthens my argument".

> raises the hackles of old school readers of Adbusters.

I feel seen.

I wonder about that. Knuth pronounces TeX like "tech" and Kleene pronounced his name like "Clay-knee", but are these wrong or trolls? Are folks who say "liberry" or "nukular" wrong or trolls? There are deep linguistic questions here, and they won't be reached by simply dismissing heterodox pronunciations as wrong.

It may interest you to know that GIF is pronounced "jif", because of the pun that "choosy developers choose GIF" [0][1]. Rather than dismissing you as wrong or a troll, I'd like to acknowledge that your heterodox choices are valid and enrich our language.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jif_(peanut_butter)#Advertisin...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation_of_GIF

I agree with your general point, but the claim "everyone other than a few pedants pronounce it the correct way" does not match my experience at all. People I talk to seem to be pretty evenly split on the matter, and most are entirely unaware that there is any controversy about the pronunciation at all.

The commodification of culture jamming!

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