week 6: blogging task

Stuart Hall (1973) wrote about the active role of the audience, distinguishing between three types of reading strategies used to interpret texts – the dominant, hegemonic reading or preferred reading, the negotiated reading and the oppositional reading.

The case of ‘perfectly transparent communication’ comes from the first hegemonic position mentioned above as the dominant. This is when the viewer takes the connoted meaning from, for example, a television current affair programme, full and straight, and decodes the message. This is where the reference code in which it has been encoded, the viewer is then operating inside the dominant code.

The politics of Northern Ireland are predominantly produced by political and military elites. How broadcasting professionals are able both to operate with 'relatively autonomous' codes of their own and to act in such a way as to reproduce the hegemonic signification of events is a complex matter.

Audiences probably understand quite sufficiently what has been dominantly defined and professionally signified. However, the dominant definitions are hegemonic precisely because they symbolise definitions of situations and events which are ‘in dominance’. This is the negotiated position.

http://au.ign.com/articles/2013/05/31/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games-why-it-matters

Joost Raessens examines the participatory media cultures of computer games with attention to the concepts of multimediality, virtuality, interactivity, connectivity.

“Culture, as the site where meaning is generated and experienced, becomes a determining, productive field through which social realities are constructed, experienced and interpreted” (Turner, 1996, p. 14).

Interpretation in the participatory culture can be used in the structure developed in the British tradition of cultural studies. Cultural studies became evident with the traditional definition of culture that only allowed for the superior art forms of literature, classical art and music. Another focus was also in play on more popular art forms in which so-called ‘‘good taste’’ was surrendered for commercial success and the demands of the general public. In this perspective, think not only of pop music, soap operas, music videos on television, and Hollywood films, but also of computer games that enjoy great popularity, especially among a young mass audience.

Reference list

. 2013. . [ONLINE] Available at: http://visualstudies.buffalo.edu/coursenotes/art250/250A/_assets/_readings/encoding_decoding_hall.pdf. [Accessed 09 October 2013].

Raessens, J. 2005, ‘Computer games as participatory media culture’, Handbook of Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 373-388

Tropes vs Women in Video Games: Why It Matters - IGN. 2013. Tropes vs Women in Video Games: Why It Matters - IGN. [ONLINE] Available at: http://au.ign.com/articles/2013/05/31/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games-why-it-matters. [Accessed 09 October 2013].