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In October of 2017 fast fashion retailers H&M produced an online ad that featured some of Jason 'REVOK' Williams' graffiti in the background. Revok filed a cease and desist order to get H&M to stop using his work in their ad. H&M then sued him, claiming he had no right to copyright protections because the work was produced illegally. This lawsuit became public knowledge and infuriated the global graffiti community, who began a week long worldwide uncoordinated direct action campaign against H&M. Graffiti writers wrote graffiti on H&M storefronts and ideologically attacked H&M in social media spaces until the lawsuit was dropped. This article will examine why graffiti writers responded to the lawsuit against Revok this way, considering these graffiti writers had to undertake great personal risk to commit their acts of vandalism and, because none of them had any personal or financial stake in the outcome of the lawsuit. To understand why graffiti writers acted as they did graffiti as a protest act and as a spectacle will be discussed, as will the importance of subcultural capital. Further this article will explain the motivations of graffiti writers in their fight against H&M and the ways that they use physical and virtual spaces to build their reputations and interact and communicate with each other. Ultimately, this will explain how H&M filing the lawsuit against Revok provided a crucial moment of opportunity that allowed graffiti writers to engage in dramatic public acts of self-promotion. These acts marked writers as politically aware, anti-authoritarians willing to take risks and violate the authoritative aesthetics of the clean and controlled H&M storefronts in support of Revok, which in turn made their acts of graffiti forms of contentious political participation. Through sharing their acts on social media and associating it with the Revok vs. H&M conflict through hashtags, writers further promoted themselves, clearly associated themselves with famous graffiti writer ...

"Producing and Consuming the Craft Beer Movement is an ethnographic analysis of the craft beer movement and its rapid development as an industry that articulated a different set of values: celebrating, quality, community, and good taste. This book will provide an excellent foundation for considering craft beer and an entrepreneurial practice that produces other forms of value beyond monetary value. The craft beer movement has been an important movement for thinking about contemporary consumer culture, and how that consumer culture might develop a very different set of values and priorities from those of the dominant consumer culture that is created by large-scale industries focused on the instrumental values of profit and efficiency. Located in one site, the ethnography is situated within the larger context of the rise of digital media, the evolution of cities, and the latest stage of the capitalist marketplace. The book is distinctive as it is ethnographic in its methodology. It is focused on one locale, the metropolitan area around Philadelphia. Philadelphia, along with Boston, Denver, San Diego and a few other cities, was a central location for the early development of the craft beer industry. With its interdisciplinary approach, individuals with interests in digital and social media, consumer culture, political economy, ethnography, and contemporary cultural theory will find this an interesting case study of an important industry that developed from the homebrewing movement to become an important craft industry that is now a global phenomenon. This book is directed to a broad range of readers interested in new media, consumer culture, craft and contemporary capitalist culture. The book embeds the local in the larger historical and political economic context. Readers would include faculty members in communication, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology. Students at a graduate and upper level undergraduate level would be interested as well."

This article 'tracks' memes, forms of networked, pictorial/caption humour and social commentary – as well as cultural labour, through a process of value change: the 'meme stream'. This is a process of incorporation of cultural resistance and labour into, and by, the dominant forces of capital that facilitate them: social media networks and their advertisers. We use Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance alongside Debord's Spectacle to argue that as memes move, increasing their audience as they go, they lose resonance with a dedicated audience but gain exposure with a more diffuse audience, which is detrimental to the expression of political, countercultural or socially provocative positions. We use Doge as our explanatory structural example. Our contribution is to demonstrate that the systems that allow for the flow and movement of memes reduce their expressive content, shifting them towards a template that is impotent for cultural, social or political critique.

Some terrorist acts are meant to communicate something beyond the violence they cause. They are a form of political communication that should be studied as such. To identify the acts we consider politically communicative, we develop a typology of primary objectives that ranges from strategic goals to such communicative statements as moral condemnation. We examine why, as a form of political communication, terrorist acts typically fail. Terrorism fails as political communication because it is violent; because targeted audiences often have little prior awareness of the group's grievances; because it is sometimes a complex communication; and because governments and media frame issues in a way that sidelines the act's communicative content. In promoting a better understanding of the message, and why it fails, we hope to make this component of terrorism a more robust subject of study for political communication scholars.

Some terrorist acts are meant to communicate something beyond the violence they cause. They are a form of political communication that should be studied as such. To identify the acts we consider politically communicative, we develop a typology of primary objectives that ranges from strategic goals to such communicative statements as moral condemnation. We examine why, as a form of political communication, terrorist acts typically fail. Terrorism fails as political communication because it is violent; because targeted audiences often have little prior awareness of the group's grievances; because it is sometimes a complex communication; and because governments and media frame issues in a way that sidelines the act's communicative content. In promoting a better understanding of the message, and why it fails, we hope to make this component of terrorism a more robust subject of study for political communication scholars.