Encoding & decoding: a beginner's guide

The encoding and decoding model as we know it was proposed by Stuart Hall in 1973. He was a member of the Birmingham School that, like their precursors in Frankfurt, hoped to use media studies to tackle social issues

Hall wrote that there are three ways an individual spectator can decode a piece of media, which we'll call the "text":

• The Dominant Reading: This means that the spectator agrees with the ideology around which the text has been encoded. For example, if a the reader agrees with this article from The Sun; which proposes that migration and refugee intake as a burden on the country; they're taking a dominant reading (The Sun Says: PM says he wants to cut immigration ... yet he is banking on it to prop up the UK’s economy, 2016).
• The Negotiated Reading: This means that the reader considers the ideology of the text to be valid, but takes it with a pinch of salt based on their own beliefs and makes a balanced judgement. If the reader of the newspaper acknowledges that there are valid problems with the current level of migration but believes that the country should be housing people fleeing from wars, they're taking a negotiated reading.
• The Oppositional Reading: This means that the reader completely disagrees with and discredits the text based on their own ideology. If the reader of the newspaper believes there is no problem with the current level of migration and that more refugees should be allowed into the country, they're taking an oppositional reading (Hall, 1973).

Hall believed that an individual's socio-economic background was a good indicator of how they would react to certain media and this point was proved in the Nationwide Project. In 1980 David Morley and Charlotte Brunsden, two other Birmingham School members, conducted a study in which they showed certain distinct socio-economic groups an episode of the ITV magazine show Nationwide. Produced for a mainstream audience, the episode concerned the impact on early Thatcherite policies upon British industry. (Brunsden and Morley, 1999).

Brunsden and Morley found that people from upper-middle class backgrounds, such as bank managers and public school students, responded positively to the messages of the program. Groups like students took more negotiated readings, believing that the show wasn't thought provoking enough, well as people such as trade unionists and shop assistants were oppositional towards the portrayal of working class men (Brunsden and Morley, 1999).

We can analyse how a text has been encoded and some possible readings through the text "Extreme Makeover". Produced by ABC, it follows individuals who get cosmetic makeovers to "fix" an aspect of their character. In the episode I analysed, a woman named Micah gets an entirely cosmetic makeover as her looks made her bullied for years, well as a man named Chris requests something to make him employable and productive again after he lost both legs in a motorcycle accident. A dominant respondent may agree with the programme's ethic that surgery can fix problems pre-concieved by society. A negotiated reader may believe that some surgery is necessary, but not to the extent the programme is offering (Chris gets a cosmetic makeover as well as new prosthetics) well as an outright oppositional reading may not accept the text's construct of beauty or usefulness within society (Extreme Makeover, 2007).

The encoding and decoding model isn't without its flaws, however. In the Nationwide Study, one of the control groups was made up of African British students. This group did not respond oppositionally to the text because they were against its values but because, as first generation immigrants who had been brought up in a different culture, they did not understand them (Brunsden and Morley, 1999). If you don't understand something, how can you be defiant towards it? Also, Hall designed the model to be exclusively applicable to television, so its applications in other forms of media may be limited.

SOURCES:

Brunsdon, C. and Morley, D. (1999). The Nationwide television studies. London: Routledge.

Extreme Makeover, (2007). [TV programme] ABC.

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Birmingham [England]: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

The Sun Says: PM says he wants to cut immigration ... yet he is banking on it to prop up the UK’s economy. (2016). [online] The Sun. Available at: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/politics/6958425/PM-tells-us-he-wants-to-cut-immigration-yet-is-banking-on-it-to-prop-up-economy.html [Accessed 7 Mar. 2016].

The effects model: the good, the bad and the ugly.

The effects model has been a bastion of media studies for many years. Many people refer to it every day without even realising; the "nanny state" lives and dies by one of the oldest media theories.

The effects model was first thought up by the Frankfurt School, who were the first group to take the study of media seriously, as they were concerned with how it was being used as a propaganda tool.

Two of the main theorists were Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. They argued that culture had become mass produced, churned out again and again as one would produce a car. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1947). Adorno said that the repetition and routine of these new media made them useful as tools of control to reinforce the capitalist order (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1947). This idea is often called the "hypodermic needle" model as media "injects" an audience with information.

Their worldview was not shared by Walter Benjamin. He believed that the shift from art as a singular spectacle to art as a mass produced commodity represented a victory over bourgeois traditions; or as he puts it, it "emancipates art from its parasitic dependency on ritual" (Benjamin, 1968, pp.6).

Benjamin said that pre-industrial art possesses an 'aura', or a set of rituals governing its consumption; you walk into the Louvre, you ogle at the Mona Lisa from an aesthetic perspective, you leave. In an era where art can be mass-produced, you are able to appreciate the work from a whole host of social and industrial contexts (Benjamin, 1968). If the film you're watching is made in Hollywood, how does that impact the codes, conventions and values it carries?

The effects model has come under a lot of criticism in recent years. The work of Stuart Hall on audience theory proposed that there was more to the human experience of media than being a puppet. We all have individual tastes influenced by our socio-economic backgrounds, Hall says. In short, the media does not inject us with information, but instead provides us with information to make our own judgments based on our beliefs (Hall, 1973).

We can see this by watching Gogglebox, a show in which members of the British public react to television broadcasts. When the participants watched the John Lewis "Bear and the Hare" advert, opinion was diverse and appreciated the text both critically (A man remarks that the animation is "incredible, on a par with Disney" and a bewildered twenty-something yells "What the fuck is this about?") and commercially (two housemates attempt to guess which shop produced the advert and a working class mother protests its £7 million budget by stating "they're obviously making far too much money") (Gogglebox, 2014).

Another criticism of the effects model is how it treats the children as incapable of drawing their own conclusions from the media. We can see how this is disputed in The Fine Bros.' "Kids React" videos on Youtube, where children are able to form cognitive opinions about challenging topics like Caitlyn Jenner and Islamic terrorism having been given minimal information (Fine and Fine, 2016).

In conclusion, while the effects model has a lot of applications in the modern day, it's become discredited in the years since and is no longer a staple of media theory.

SOURCES:

Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1947). Dialect of Enlightenment. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Querido Verlag.

Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Fine, B. and Fine, R. (2016). Fine Brothers Entertainment. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheFineBros [Accessed 29 Feb. 2016].

Gogglebox, (2014). [TV programme] Channel 4.

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Birmingham [England]: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

Applying Herman & Chomsky's propaganda model to WWE.

Herman and Chomsky came up with the propaganda model to explain the behaviour of the media in the United States. They believed that the free market press was not a free press; as they say in Manufacturing Consent, "the global balance of power has shifted decisively toward commercial systems" (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). Herman Chomsky believed that there were five distinct filters through which corporate-owned media passed through before it was deemed suitable for the consumers, the shareholders and most importantly the owners (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). In this blog post, I will be applying their five filters to the WWE and exploring how the filters have impacted some of the decisions the company and its owners have made.

Ownership

While WWE is not itself owned by a larger conglomerate, the channel on which it broadcasts its television shows, USA Network, is a subsidiary of NBC Universal. In mid-2015, Sheamus, who had been booked as a midcard wrestler, recieved the Money in the Bank briefcase, giving him a match for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship at any time (WWE Money in the Bank, 2015). There was speculation among fans that this angle was booked to tie-in with Sheamus' role in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, a Universal Studios project (Sheamus WWE champion for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 release?, 2015). Sure enough, at Survivor Series, Sheamus, won the title from Roman Reigns (WWE Survivor Series, 2015) and, two weeks later, the trailer for TMNT2 was uploaded to YouTube.

Advertising

In 2008, WWE changed their programming, which for ten years had been violent and mature in nature, back to the family-friendly style of the 1980's to appeal to advertisers. From 2010 to 2013, merchandise revenue from Mattel licensed action figures rose from $110 million to $160 million (Graser, 2013). In fact, one of WWE's biggest controversies of the PG Era led to a sponsorship deal. During his feud with The Rock in 2011, John Cena compared his rival to Fruity Pebbles cereal and used homophobic slurs in a dis-rap against him. LGBT charity GLAAD took umbrage to this and WWE was forced to make an apology, but Post Cereals saw the publicity the line had gotten and began using Cena in their advertising campaigns and putting his likeness on boxes of Fruity Pebbles (Schultz, 2013).

Sourcing

WWE produces its own news media on WWE.com and formerly in WWE Magazine. In the modern age, its reporting tends to switch around between articles which treat wrestling as a legitimate sport and those which lay bare its status as a form of entertainment. An example of the former, in which WWE followed up on Roman Reigns being injured at the hands of Triple H when some speculated that he was given a blood capsule (Carrier, 2016), can be found here (Wortman, 2016).

Flak

The term "flak" refers to political or corporate backlash from certain actions. In 2009 the company's CEO, Linda McMahon, announced that she would begin running for the United States Senate (Whittell, 2010). Because McMahon was a conservative Republican, she didn't want the flak from a product that had come under fire from censors in the past for being unsuitable for families and resigned from the company when her bid began (Fightmaster, 2009).

Anti-Communism

Professional wrestling has been very much guilty of this in the past. The first real communist heel was a "bear-man" named Ivan Koloff, played the Quebecois Oreal Perras. In 1971, Koloff was booked to end the seven-year WWWF Championship reign of the company's top good guy, Bruno Sammartino. Due to a combination of anti-communist fears, the portrayal of his character and many audience members still believing wrestling to be a legitimate sport, his win was met with silence; Sammartino himself feared he had gone deaf (Henry, 2015). WWE has also been guilty of driving other fear-based media ideologies with characters like Muhammad Hassan, a Muslim who once "prayed" for men in ski masks to kidnap The Undertaker (WWE Smackdown, 2005) and the Putin-supporting Lana, who brought up the MH-17 plane crash- accused of being perpetrated by pro-Russian rebels- in one of her talking segments (WWE Battleground, 2014).

SOURCES

Carrier, S. (2016). Roman Reigns Blades on Monday's RAW?. [online] All Wrestling News. Available at: http://www.allwrestlingnews.com/wwe-news/roman-reigns-blades-mondays-raw/ [Accessed 6 Mar. 2016].

Fightmaster, M. (2009). WWE CEO Linda McMahon resigns to lay a smackdown on the U.S. Senate - DailyFinance. [online] DailyFinance.com. Available at: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/09/16/wwe-ceo-linda-mcmahon-resigns-to-lay-the-smackdown-on-the-u-s-s/ [Accessed 6 Mar. 2016].

Graser, M. (2013). WWE’s Promo Mania. [online] Variety. Available at: http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/wwe-promotion-mania-john-cena-mcmahon-1200343356/ [Accessed 6 Mar. 2016].

Henry, J. (2015). 25 Memorable WWE Moments At Madison Square Garden. [online] Camel Clutch Blog. Available at: http://camelclutchblog.com/25-memorable-wwe-moments-at-madison-square-garden/ [Accessed 6 Mar. 2016].

Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent. New York: Pantheon Books.

Schultz, E. (2013). Fruity Pebbles Raw: WWE Star Finishes Fred Flintstone. [online] Adage.com. Available at: http://adage.com/article/news/wwe-s-cena-boots-fred-flintstone-fruity-pebbles-box/239009/ [Accessed 6 Mar. 2016].

Sheamus WWE champion for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 release?. (2016). [online] Wrestlingforum.com. Available at: http://www.wrestlingforum.com/general-wwe/1762953-sheamus-wwe-champion-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-2-release.html [Accessed 6 Mar. 2016].

Whittell, G. (2010). WWE boss Linda McMahon takes ten-point lead in Republican race for the Senate | The Times. [online] The Times. Available at: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/americas/article2465775.ece [Accessed 6 Mar. 2016].

Wortman, J. (2016). Update: Roman Reigns provides exclusive post-surgery day 2 photo following Triple H attack. [online] www.wwe.com. Available at: http://www.wwe.com/shows/raw/2016-02-22/article/reigns-surgery [Accessed 6 Mar. 2016].

WWE Battleground. (2014). [DVD] Tampa: WWE.

WWE Smackdown, (2005). [TV programme] UPN.

WWE Survivor Series. (2015). [DVD] Atlanta: WWE.