Hall seems to correctly suggest that every image/text in mass media is created and used to serve the interest of the dominant class, and that the interests are achieved not through the denotative meaning of the image/text but through connotations. The means of mass media such as television are constantly bombarding their audience with images and tag lines and, despite their ambiguous and indirect messages and forms, they promote certain ways of thinking, lifestyles, and beliefs.
“American” mass media has shaped the global culture through successful transparency between encoding and decoding of the message. Hollywood movies and MTV programs do no seem to offer any alternative ways of interpretation and generally force the viewers to a certain dominant-hegemonic decoding. This globalization of American culture would not have been achieved if viewers did not operate within the ‘dominant’ code.

Marx points out that a more effective way to have control over people and society is to have control over their culture. Western broadcast media well demonstrated this view by their dominance over the global culture. New media and especially cyber technologies offer new means of communication and inexpensive means of production and distribution of news and entertainment. They also offer new possibilities to minority cultures to broadcast their ideas via YouTube or blogs in a less homogenized way. Will the idea of having a certain dominant class, corporate or capitalist force in the world seem to be soon the thing of the past?

Karl Marx’s The German Ideology would have been a fun reading assignment for me if I could interpret it better. Growing up in Taiwan, of course, our textbooks always belittled communism as much as they could as long as it still sounded “fair”. (Back to Hall’s encoding/ Decoding: we as students are really not that easily manipulated.) What I found interesting was the angle that Marx took to look at the whole “system.” (I can’t come up with any better word to describe it.) And it was not hard for me to understand why communists took over China so rapidly at that time when they did. After my family moved to America, I recall hearing people saying that America is the biggest communist country in the world if you examine the social system. I am not sure if that is necessarily true. But I do find it disturbing that my tax money is being used to feed those drug dealers in prison, homeless people who accept “cash only, no food” along the highways.

I’m sure Hall would argue that it was still a story, and I understand why. However, the lack of production value caused the event didn’t not have the typical new elements of storytelling. Is this all because of the live nature of it? Or is this just a perfect example of operating inside the dominate code?

I believe that there are moments of absolute clarity among media, on which instances are not “systematic distorted communication” and that “perfectly transparent communication” can in fact exist. I think that Hall is completely correct about almost all being entrenched in this philosophy; however, I think there are moments that can be more powerful than these ideals. I think transparent communications can, and in fact do exist, however they are the exception and not the rule. These are the moments that have not been taken over by the production machine that is media. Hall speaks of producers “failing to get their message across,” however the moments of absolute clarity, at least for me, have been those that the producers have not touched.

What troubles me in this reading is Hall’s exclusion of all other forms of media in discussion of his encoding/decoding model. Why does he only discuss television broadcast when this model is also applicable to other forms of media such as photography, radio, and cinema? I believe Hall could make any even stronger argument when applying his model to the written word; language alone is more arbitrary than the visual, and therefore can be more easily misinterpreted.

Stuart and De Saussure use similar terms to describe the assimilation of visual language. Sign signifier etc. Also, Stuart Hall extends De Saussure’s arguments about value and distinction to language. De Saussure describes the psychological characteristic of language as having a seat in the brain. Stuart briefly explores reality existing outside of language to introduce his points about discourse and code. Would De Saussure agree with Stuart Hall about the communication of language? Stuart is using visual language to make a point television as a mode of communication and De Saussure does use technology as a mode of communication.

Finally, I would like to see Carl Marx and Plato have a conversation about the difference between animal and man. Marx makes the distinction about consciousness being the difference between man and animal. Marx would have to further define consciousness in greater details. Also, He dismiss the idea of consciousness in the same paragraph by stating you can divide man and animal by any term of your choice.

Regarding Karl Marx, there is mention on the first page of the modern Young-Hegelian Philosophy, what exactly is this philosophy? I would like to understand this better.
Marx says “men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness”. I have heard this quote several times in the past and I am wondering if this was Marx’s original idea or did the idea stem from another person?

But it does not stop there. Even though a message of some sort may have been encoded for a particular audience, that audience must take that and then decode it. “Before this message can have an ‘effect’ (however defined), satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded. It is this set of decoded meanings which ‘have an effect’, influence, entertain, instruct or persuade…” (165). The message, only after the decoding process, has an effect on the audience.

There are problems, however. A way something is encoded may be different from the way something has been decoded. If there are two sides of the exchange, encoding and decoding, what matters the most in this triangle, so to speak, is the top point. This is the middle ground between what has been encoded and what has been decoded. While each side may even be very different, this meeting point is what matters most in the exchange. The only problem is that no one actually experiences this middle ground. On one side, of the equation, there is the message pre-encoding that is understood by the bearer. On the other, there is the message post-decoding, understood by the recipient. If something is never experienced by anyone, if there is no arbiter that stands outside the equation, does this middle ground even exist? How could it be proven? If Hall is the arbiter, then who is the arbiter over the Encoding/Decoding piece? It seems there is a hole in the equation, the content of which can be sensed but not proven.

Marx’s critique of German Ideology focuses on several concepts.
The common ground between Marx and Stuart lies in the construct of Stuart’s analysis of the language behind and complexity of mass communications: “Discursive knowledge is the product not of the transparent representation of the “real” in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions. Thus there is no intelligible discourse without the operation of code” (p.167, Hall). While Stuart addresses the complexity of the “message”, he refers to representation of signs (Peirce). Stuart compares these complexity of “encodes” to Marx’s divisions of Labor.

Along with labor, Marx’s critique of German ideologists, specifically, the Hegelian, which are a group of German philosophers. Their beliefs toward religion contributes to the lack of German history. Furthermore, Marx critiques the lack of German history through his analysis of the divisions of government and labor. He addresses three forms of government: Tribal, ancient, and feudal. Marx discusses in detail the role of production, which Stuart, refers to in the complexity of “production, circulation, distribution, and consumption of communications. Stuart address these roles as non-linear operations.

Marx addresses “the four aspects of the primary historical relationships. This leads Marx into a difficulty discussion regarding “Consciousness”. Although it seemed fragmented at times, specifically this statement: “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”. I was confused by this dialogue but, I feel this whole treatise on consciousness relates to Stuart’s argument of complexity of layers within the message, and the idea of history which Marx states: ”Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata.” This seems to be the key relation to Stuart’s break-down of what he referred to as a non-linear process or break in the circuit. I would like to discuss the non-linear break and how this relates to Marx’s critique of German history.?

Marx would have been highly interested in the computers ability to destroy what Marx calls “an exclusive sphere of activity” by allowing individuals access to vast amount of information. Thus in a sense using a computer someone can go hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner, but to an even greater degree. On the computer I can multitask allowing me to do all those things and more.

Marx would have also seen the computer’s ability to connect people as a powerful communist tool. As Marx states, “it is clear that the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections.” Networks and the Internet which allows for the information of the world to be accessible at the touch of a button would help individuals be “liberated from the various national and local barriers, [and] be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world.

The personal computer is quite a paradox. On the one hand it has such strong ties to capitalist society and business. It created and opened up many new ways to make money, and yet it also has very strong ties to communism and the freeing of the individual.