Blog

Answer & Explanation:Review
and reflect on the readings and film issues. Consider these questions
and post your responses in the discussion forum. Remember to respond to
classmates posts as well.
What is theory?How does theory help us understand media and our experience of it?Hall says ideology is encoded into all media messages, how do we
recognize ideology in media? Is Hall’s concept of ideology encoding and
audience decoding important to understanding media experience?What does bell hooks say about critical thinking and why is it valuable?Does critical thinking about media improve or diminish media appreciation?
Article 1The Whites of their Eyes Reading Notes
Hegemony is the power or dominance that one social group holds over
others…more than social power itself, but a method for gaining and
maintaining power.
Hegemony is “fragile…requires renewal & modification through assertion, reassertion of power” (Lull, p. 61).
Ideology is “Media’s main sphere of operations is the production and transformation of  ideology” (Hall, 89).
Media are a means of ideological production and contribute to the
reaffirmation of existing ideas and power relationships. This
ideological wor

k helps secure hegemony over time.
Stuart Hall identified how media creators encode ideology into messages. Then audiences decode ideology from messages. 
Hall identifies these three types of decoding, receiving or interpreting message.
Dminant—Person interprets message according to intended meaning or dominant ideology.Negotiated—Person interprets message meaning in negotiation with
own experience and knowledge, accepts some ideology and rejects some
ideology.Oppositional—Interprets message in contradiction to intended meaning or ideology.
Hall says
Media’s main sphere of operations is the production and transformation of ideologies.Ideologies articulate or connect different elements into a chain or
set of meanings and are not the product of individual consciousness.Ideologies form part of the determinate social formations and conditions into which individuals are born.Ideologies provide us with the means of making sense of social relations and our place within them.Transformation of ideology is therefore a collective process.Ideologies work by constructing positions of identification and
knowledge which people voice as ideological truths as if they were
authentic authors.