I just finished reading Stuart Hall's Encoding and Decoding and compared it to Youtube.
Youtube has become a communicative event as Hall stated. Overnight, Youtube has linked groups of people together by showing videos of different worlds, places and people to the masses. I've been able to see things from other countries that I would have never seen without it. Unlike Rosen, the message is something we can't ignore. We are actively engaged in the process of watching videos. We get to choose what videos we want to watch and when we want to watch them. In addition, we can pick our favorites and even post our own videos.
Youtube is both a sender and receiver of information. We have used the medium to connect people into our lives that normally wouldn't be in it. We can get information from everything from the medical field to silly pet videos. I know that I watch it to learn the latest headline news, sports and comedic shows.
Hall asks, "What is content?"
Content is the story that Youtube gives us. There are millions of stories that people are exposed to. I know for myself how I enjoy watching a video only to find myself watching a link to another video. Suddenly, 2 hours have gone by and I wonder what happened with the time. Youtube links many stories together that pull people in to watch. It's not uncommon to have discussions about the content on Youtube. In a way, Youtube has built a community of viewers on not only a local scale, but an international one too!
Hall talks about how the representation of violence on television isn't violence but messages about violence. I thought this was interesting because I know that when I watch violent things on television, I am able to identify if something is violent or not. Scary music, dark lighting, or even nervous actors pretending to be scared, give the viewer the clues to identify violent messages. In addition, our interpretation of these messages is what we have been conditioned to base our decisions on. Now, with reality television, the viewer is exposed even more to the dysfunction of our society and have become desensitized to it's effects.
This leads me into what Hall says that, "Certain codes may be naturalized in to us over time". This is because they give you certain codes that make us think that we are looking at the actually object we are naming. We have been so accustomed to images around us that we have begun to develop certain ideas about objects in our lives. Again, we have been conditioned to agree with what is in front of us as fact because we don't question what we have been brought up to know as truth. Hall's example was the winter sweater advertisement. I agree with Hall and believe I've fallen into this mind-set even without my knowing it. As Hall states, we have identified and decoded a certain number of signs and put them in a creative relation between themselves and with other signs.
Hall finishes his discussion with 3 hypothetical positions. Each one offers ways we have adapted to watching media around us.
The dominant-henemonic positon is about the media operating with certain rules. Their job is to show images within a range for people to absorb and learn from.
The negotiated code is built around certain parameters that the message must be in. The focus is to understand what is right and wrong about what the images are.
The oppositional code is based on showing the opposite of what the viewers actually want.
I think all 3 positions offer a construct for us to look at media in a new way. After reading some of their definitions, I was struck with the idea that we move back and forth from each position. I think in that way, it helps to keep our minds active and our focused on what we really want in our lives.
In addition to becoming a "communicative event", I also think Youtube is great because it provide us a place to fill in the gap of representation that Hall suggested by allowing us to comment on the producer's video. The comment feature is like a bridge, connecting the producer's point of view to our interpretation of the video. Speaking in a larger scale, when a lot of people are commenting on the same video and the author is aware of the different idea that viewers came up with, he'll be able to have a complete conceptual map instead of just his idea, which is only a tiny point of the big picture.
ReplyDeleteBut seems like this is not the end of the story, just like Hall said, we'll have to be active in receiving information: we'll have to identity the codes and use them to judge whether an image is right or wrong.