ABSTRACT
In January 2009 the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) referred the Take a Benylin Day campaign to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Benylin's vigorous defence of the campaign provided for a fascinating instance in Henry Giroux observation, that postmodern advertising has the propensity to paradoxically blur the modernist distinction between the politics of representation and the representation of politics. The integration of advertising media with user generated horizontal networks of interactive communication, have enabled activists to garner local support, for global political issues through the creation of online communities and transnational networks. For a generation of sociologists, such advances in advertising technologies provide a near-perfect analogy of Michel Foucault's principle of discipline. Advertising media coincides with the complex cultural codes and multiplicity of operating strategies that define network enterprises. For just like the spirit of informationalism digital advertising technologies live within the accelerated speed of the opto-electronic circuits that advance the informational networked flows of reflexive accumulation.
