Comparing Newcomb's Encoding And Decoding

In Scholes essay, “On Reading a Video Text,” he analyzes the relationships between the photographic techniques and narrative messages in commercials. Photographic techniques cause the viewer to understand their culture in a specific way; cultural reinforcement causes the viewer to construct a story based on the viewer’s knowledge. The images lead to an emotional connection between the commercials message and the viewer. The connection causes the viewer to surrender to the text and by surrendering to the text the viewer accepts the messages. It is important to understand which messages to accept. For these reasons, it is imperative that the viewer understands media literacy. Scholes emphasizes the importance of teaching media literacy in schools. Political campaign ads attempt to get the viewer to surrender to the text and trust what the commercial reveals. Thus, it is vital to

Pop culture is defined as a product of a culture that has a mass audience (Zeisler 2008:1). Pop culture is considered dependent on advertising, depicting women and people of colour in a problematic way and discriminating manner (Ziesler, 2008:2). Popular culture has become our common knowledge, and to understand it is a key part in understanding society as a whole. According to Beamish (2016), popular culture is a form of symbolic communication between humans. Symbols can be anything that can be recognized by a culture and often presented in the forms of language, values, norms, and material culture. The use of language is a powerful tool that allows for the media to relay particular messages to the rest of society. The imposition of certain concepts as a result can be argued as having a direct affect on the daily lives of those who are exposed. Whereas material culture allows the population to see these messages visually through advertisements, film, and television. Some basic forms of pop culture include television, film, music, news, and advertising. Popular culture is rooted in mass culture, and deemed for those who could not afford the means to participate in high culture activities. Those who subjected to the popular culture were assumed to be uneducated and unworthy of “real art” (Ziesler, 2008:1). The mass media

Technology is constantly developing and has been for many years now. Many of these developments have centered around digital video and improving the ways in which we view television. Developments such as Netflix, a company that allows people to stream a wide range of movies and television shows, have not only caused a time shift, but have also allowed for an increased flexibility in the temporal structures of television. The different temporalities of television can be seen as it moves from broadcast modes of distribution, to on demand services like Netflix and further suggests that television is a changing service in its relationship to public life. This will be demonstrated through an analysis of the broadcast of television shows and movies,

I argue that authors and producers often attempt to impose their own set of cultural and political ideologies on its audience through a certain depiction of right and wrong. In this manner, works of fiction might influence, perhaps even alter, the ideologies of the audience.[3] Accordingly, analyzing the depiction of ideologies in media content can serve as a basis for further research on if and how producers intend to influence their audience.

Jenkins talks about how the consumption of media products is a collective process, in other words, the collective intelligence is seen as an alternative source of media power. He describes how within popular culture, the collective meaning making is shaping and changing the ways religion, education, laws, politics, advertising and how the military operate (4). Jenkins discusses a process called “convergence of modes”, he explains that media and communication are becoming interconnected like the telephone and television.

In Robert Scholes essay, “On Reading a Video Text” Scholes asserts that modern visual media or “video texts” provide a powerful vehicle for “cultural literacy.” By making use of “visual fascination” in mass media and in particular, commercials, these “video texts” use this part to bring viewers out of boredom and pique their interest. Following this, “narrativity” comes into play not only giving viewers the story but providing them with the ignition for their on context using their own cultural knowledge and experience on the commercial. The final step in the process is the ideological confirmation that is “cultural reinforcement,” the securing of one’s place in a body or group. With “video texts” more widely seen than traditional forms of

Beyond the fact that Manjoo conflates entertainment niches with political divisions fueled by greater sociopolitical and economic influences—already a large correlative jump that does not indicate causation—he suggests that the mainstream culture of a TV-Nation somehow promoted a national unity due to a shared cultural lexicon of sitcoms. The idea that we were more united in the past due to a more singular channel of information demonstrates a one-sided viewpoint. The mainstream may have dominated, but it wasn’t all inclusive.

Popular culture is the artistic and creative expression in entertainment and style that appeals to society as whole. It includes music, film, sports, painting, sculpture, and even photography. It can be diffused in many ways, but one of the most powerful and effective ways to address society is through film and television. Broadcasting, radio and television are the primary means by which information and entertainment are delivered to the public in virtually every nation around the world, and they have become a crucial instrument of modern social and political organization. Most of today’s television programming genres are derived from earlier media such as stage, cinema and radio. In the area of comedy, sitcoms have proven

their culture. Television over the years has molded the minds of its viewers – young and

Parodies are usually used when comedy is intended, but sometimes they are also used to reflect much deeper issues. The world Truman Burbank inhabits in The Truman Show (1998) is a parody of the world of the audience of “The Truman Show”, but Truman’s world is just as much the truth to him, as the world of the show’s audience is to them. It can be argued Truman’s world is both a reflection and a refraction of the world of the show’s audience.

In ‘How Netflix is Deepening our Cultural Echo Chambers’, Farhad Manjoo uses the remake of “One Day at a Time” to emphasize the imperative shift of an era focused on streaming that entails a narrow set of refined references. By first exhibiting a remade show on a platform such as Netflix, the re-examination of reality is displayed to be evolving the mainstream identity of millions. From broadcasting, cable then to streaming the secular depiction of being a “vast wasteland” emerges into the view of a “bubbling sea of creativity” that allows for collective groups of individuals to be recognized. Manjoo insinuates that through the shared references viewers attained through television, nothing thereafter will have the direct mass impact of a singular movement of culture that the medium television had at its peak. Although seemingly

In this essay, I am going to discuss how undoubtable/valid TV may seem, in regards to media convergence, social class in American sitcoms, Post-Fordism, and televisual Black fatherhood.

Neil Postman’s novel Amusing Ourselves to Death seeks to look at media and how it shapes and defines culture. Postman has been cited as one of the major media theorists and a great philosopher of his time. To understand the book fully it is important to remember where it came from. The idea was born out of a speech Postman gave about the book 1984 and A Brave New World. It takes the ideas behind these novels and looks at them in a contemporary light, where the “Big Brother” is our own television sets. Television is obviously a form of media and it delivers a message. However, that message and media has its own agenda, to above all entertain. Postman believes that television has become the primary media-metaphor and by that definition

The difference between the intended meaning of media texts and what the audience actually perceives can be shockingly different. Producers of media can do everything possible to force audiences to experience their work in the way they want them to, but in the end they still take away many different meanings even within the same audience. Stuart Hall outlines this in his encoding and decoding model. One of the most apparent examples of this is the television show South Park. The television show South Park is a media text with the producers’ preferred meaning of being decoded as joke or as being satire, but many audience members take an oppositional stance of taking it seriously. This is clear from the examples of controversy when South Park aired episodes focused on Scientology, red-headed people, and Islam. Through these examples it is demonstrated that the producers of media have less power compared to the audience in determining the meaning of media.

In our society, there are many forms of mediated texts ranging from newspapers and magazines to films and television shows. Each of these media forms can be seen from different theoretical perspectives and analyzed to understand the different concepts that may influence them. Television shows are one of the most popular media texts with approximately 400 new shows airing each year (Ryan, 2016). However, it is often very unlikely for these television shows to strive as 65% are cancelled after their first season (Ocasio, 2012). This then, brings Marxist scholars into the picture as they are interested in how economic factors affect the production and distribution of media content (Mack & Ott, 2016). The Marxist theoretical perspective allows Marxist scholars to study television shows in order to understand why they were cancelled and how certain roles in the media lead to this.