TELEVISION, TEXTS AND AUDIENCES

ENCODING & DECODING

Cultural Studies vs Mass Communications theory Mass communications research grew out of, and displaced, earlier work on the media by the Frankfurt School. It worked on the assumption that the media offered an unproblematic, benign reflection of society

Frankfurt School
a group of German Marxist intellectuals (including Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer) who had migrated to America before the Second World War and who saw the effects of the media in broadly negative terms.

Adorno and Horkheimer

Cultural products are commodities produced by the Culture Industry Cultural products are authoritarian, conformist, and highly standardized. The aim of standardization : standardized reaction and the affirmation of life as it is.

 Its concern was with the effects of the media on society, which is measured through empirical studies (that is studies based on observation rather than theory) of individual behaviour.

TELEVISION AND TEXT

NEWS IDEOLOGY

construct ed reality

structures of signification (the operation of power)

active and knowledgeab le producers of meaning

not products of a structured text

active producers of meaning from within their own cultural context

ENCODING & DECODING

The process of television encoding is the ARTICULATION(A temporary unity of discursive elements that do not have to go together) of the linked moments of production, circulation, distribution and reproduction. The production of meaning (intended by the encoders) does not ensure consumption of that meaning (by the audiences) because television messages are polysemic (multiple meanings).

ENCODING & DECODING

as the audiences share cultural codes with the producers/encoders, they will decode messages within the same framework. Where the audiences are situated in different social positions (class, gender), they will decode the programmes in their alternative ways

the conventional model of communication

- linear recever

Three decoding positions (Stuart Hall)

the dominant-hegemonic encoding/decoding which accepts the preferred meanings a negotiated code to acknowlege the legitimacy of the hegemonic but also to make its own rules and adaptations under circumstances an oppositional code to understand the preferred encoding but to reject and to decode in contrary ways.

Arguments against the mass communications model

meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; the message is never transparent; the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning

Text and Meanings

the text may structure aspects of meaning by guiding the readers, but it can not fix meanings (which are the oscillations -repeated change from one to the other- between the text and the imagination of the readers)

decodings varied by socio-demographic factors (class, age, sex, race) and by their associated cultural competencies and frameworks

The meaning of 9/11 tragedy

North America had become the tragic victim of a terrorist attack. The sense of tragedy was highlighted in showing the traumatised reaction of audiences in Europe and in America as they received the news. However, people in Palestine apparently are celebrating the news