Here's an idea.
You don't necessarily consume media so much as you decode it.
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When talking about what we do with the music, TV
shows, movies, books, and comics in our lives,
we may say that we listen to, watch, or read them.
But in the same way we may abstract media itself
into the homogeneous monad of content,
what we do with that content may also
get abstracted into the totalizing
process of consumption.
We consume content.
We are content and media consumers.
The metaphor of media as consumable good
isn't so much a media theory as it
is a convenience of language.
We need to be able to talk about what we do with information
and entertainment, how it gets into our brains
through our various sense organs and has an effect on us.
But really, it's not just talking.
The way we talk about things frames how we think about
and understand them, cf.
Lackoff and Jonson's The "Metaphors We Live By."
Or as media theorist Stuart Hall wrote, "reality
exists outside language, but is constantly mediated
by and through language.
And what we can know and to say has
to be produced in and through discourse."
The media is consumable good metaphor can actually
frame and influence what we think media is, what's in it,
and how it works.
True, this metaphor does get weird
when you think about how most consumable goods get consumed.
When they're used, they're used up,
which is not the case with media.
Media we consume doesn't go away like food, water, cleaning
products, or office supplies.
You could argue that physical media specifically
degrades with use, but that similarity seems
convenient and not fundamental.
That it goes away isn't the functional access
of consumptions use for media.
What is functional, I think, is the idea
that media, like food, is something
we ingest, we take it in.
I mean, just look at extensions of the media
as consumable good metaphor.
Talking about one's media diet, how we binge on TV
shows or devour a good book.
In each case, there's a process whereby something outside of us
is absorbed.
And the subtext of this process is
very food related, that what we consume affects us.
In dietary terms, this has been rendered
into a rhetorical diamante.
You are what you eat.
The food goods that we consume have an impact on our bodies.
Good food, good body, bad food, bad body.
There's a similar idea about media,
except what's bad or good is arrived at culturally
not nutritionally, which is not to say
that nutrition is divorced from culture or economics,
for that matter.
And this does actually make me wonder what the media
equivalent of calories may be.
Anyway, what hangs in the balance
with media is not our physical health, but our minds.
The pearl clutching worry is that media full of sex, drugs,
violence, cussing, and like Satan worship, I guess,
will rot your brain.
Or your morals and sense of propriety, really,
in the same way that candy will rot
your teeth or nonstop steaks will give you heart disease.
The sub-subtext then of the media
as consumable good metaphor is that what we get out of media
is what was put into it by whomever
made it, be it nature or a man in the factory downtown.
If there's sugar in the candy we consume,
we are necessarily consuming sugar.
So if there is violence in "A Clockwork Orange,"
we are necessarily consuming violence.
Right?
And still sub-subtextually, in the same way
our digestion of food is complex and ongoing but ultimately
passive, this metaphor suggests so too is our digestion
of media messages.
If you eat candy and therefore sugar,
it's not like you have an active role in your response
to that sugar.
You were active in the mastication and ingestion,
but not the digestion and nutrient
extraction, all of which are part of consumption.
So if you watch "A Clockwork Orange,"
then aren't you necessarily absorbing a wee
bit of the old ultraviolence?
Certainly seems that way.
Of course, not everything is what those [INAUDIBLE] is it?
There are more than a few ways to think
through how media works.
We've talked about some of them in past "But Wait" videos.
The hypodermic needle compares media messages to medicine.
Uses and gratifications casts media as information
that we use.
In his "Hot versus Cold" media theory,
Marshall McLuhan describes media as messages built fundamentally
on interaction, even if you feel like a passive, well, consumer.
Right now we're going to talk about Stuart Hall, who
you may remember from a few minutes we go.
We're going to talk about his concept of encoding
and decoding.
Hall wasn't responding to the consumption metaphor
specifically.
He even uses it here and there.
But the framework that he builds involves a process
which takes place prior to, and in some senses supersedes
consumption.
Writing about television in the '70s and '80s,
Hall became frustrated that media messages
were treated as these distinct packets
of deterministic meaning.
It was thought that audiences received meaning from media
because it was put there by creators
or it occurred naturally.
If audiences didn't get the right meaning,
it was a miscommunication.
The results of this process, then,
were fed back into production to fine tune
the whole thing in the hopes of reducing miscommunication.
In his essay "Encoding and Decoding,"
Hall's suggestion is that it is a lot more complicated
than that.
He says it goes far beyond sender, message, receiver
or production, distribution, production
to a complex set of interlocking and distinctive moments.
He names production, circulation,
distribution/consumption, and reproduction.
And he says that before consumption even takes place,
there's a step where the audience extracts meaning.
This moment sets up the success of the next steps.
Hall says that if no meaning is taken,
there can be no consumption.
This may seem backwards.
If you don't consume something, you
won't get anything from it, duh.
But if you've taken nothing from it, even if you've ingested it,
has nothing been consumed?
How would you even go about consuming something but taking
nothing from it?
This disconnect is probably due to the limits
of the consumption metaphor.
You can't consume candy but not consume its sugar.
So Hall's thought sort of seems bizarre.
Media though, is different from candy, sort of.
When media is made, Hall says it is
encoded by a complex meaning-making system that
exists prior to the media itself.
And that system is informed by all kinds of things.
The capabilities and mandates of the producing entity,
their goals, their ideologies, their thoughts
about the audience, the relative success
of previous media messages, the conventions
of media messages in general, and so on and so forth.
In the production of media, all of that stuff, all
those thoughts and ideas and politics,
they're crammed into both language, because remember
reality is mediated by discourse,
and also the language of that media specifically,
the conventions of photography, print, video, audio,
illustration, whatever.
In short, media always reflects the conditions of its creation.
It's an artifact that has encoded
all that complicated meaning, purposefully and carefully
in some respects, but also passively and nearly
invisibly in other respects simply
as a result of having been made by people in a culture.
After media is encoded and produced,
it's released as a product for people to use.
To use it, Hall says audiences must decode it.
And it's in the decoding that we get the things we
identify as coming from media.
Hall writes "It is this set of decoded meanings
which have an effect, influence, entertain, instruct,
or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive,
emotional, ideological, or behavioral consequences."
In other words, to be affected by media is to have decoded it.
And having decoded it, one then brings
what they've learned in the process
back into the world as action, opinion, belief, perception.
Hall calls this reproduction.
Hall also points out that "the codes of encoding and decoding
may not be perfectly symmetrical."
This is super important.
The closer an audience is to the codes of media producers,
the easier they'll be able to decode its meanings.
If audience and producer have vastly different codes,
there's going to be trouble.
Hall writes "what are called distortions
or misunderstandings arise precisely
from the lack of equivalence between the two sides
in a communicative exchange."
Lots of signs may be obvious.
Like a video of a cow obviously represents cow.
But at more abstract levels, encoders and decoders
have to share higher and higher levels of understanding
if an audience is to get out of a piece of media
exactly what producers meant to put into it.
Except, hold the phone, what if audiences don't want to?
Or they want to get more out of it than what was meant?
Hall stipulates the decoders can choose their code.
Unlike consumption and digestion,
decoding isn't passive, or rather, it doesn't have to be.
Hall talks about different types of decodings
and how the type that you use, which you are by no means bound
to, even during the course of one particular piece of media,
determines what you get from that media.
For instance, if one accepts the meanings intended,
then they are quote "operating inside the dominant code."
A negotiated code is a take it and leave it approach.
One understands that media has authority, but also has
a necessarily non-nuanced view of the world.
Acknowledges both the legitimacy and the shortcomings
of the dominant code.
And an oppositional code reads perpendicular
or even counter to the dominant, finding meanings which
are implied or even contrary to its encoding.
Someone may choose their code reflexively or purposefully.
They may do it academically or for laughs, for all media
or in response to certain messages
only, or for different reasons at different times.
You may see now some similarities between decoding
and consumption.
Similar to how our bodies treat food, one's history and past,
their experiences changes how they
digest something, what they can take in,
and how it will sit with them.
But digestion, though it is an always evolving process,
remains ultimately an unconscious one.
Decoding, as a theory and a metaphor,
places agency where it should be,
with audience members purposefully interacting
with media messages.
Unlike consumption, it sets up the ability
for nuanced or adversarial interactions,
finding meanings which aren't on the face of the media.
Ultraviolence as critique, not celebration.
Or meanings which weren't intended, but exist,
nonetheless.
Sort of like consuming candy, but digesting kale.
Except it's consuming a kid's show,
but digesting one for adults.
Consuming news, but digesting propaganda.
Consuming horror, but digesting comedy.
And finally, when decoding is complete,
that is when the audience has received the media
and it enters that discourse, the one involved
with the conventions of its media
and the experiences of its audience.
Who will then reproduce its meanings and conventions
in their own lives, and possibly other pieces of media
that they make for other people to decode.
Which I know it doesn't sound as good to say they
that you are going to go like decode
your new favorite TV show.
We may never widely call ourselves content decoders.
Though it may be more accurate.
What do you all think?
What is the relationship between consuming media and decoding
media, and how does each change how we think media works,
what's in it, and what we do with it?
Let us know in the comments, and I will respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding the changing
nature of the label "troll."
If you want to watch that one, you
can click here or find a link in the doobly-doo.
Hey also, it's really nice to be back.
It's nice to see everybody again.
And thanks again to everybody who came to the Nerd Night
a couple weeks ago, the PBSDS series of talks
we did of the YouTube space here.
It was great to see everybody, to hang out, get to say hey.
In next week's episode, we're going
to be talking about the first thing we read for the Idea
Channel Book Club, which is a short story by Jorge Luis
Borges called "Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote."
We've already shot that episode, so if you write a comment,
it won't make its way into the video.
But that's not an excuse for not reading it and getting
involved in the conversation that's on the Subreddit that's
really good, super interesting.
We'll put a link to the book club thread in the description
as well.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and Subreddit links
in the doobly-doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from one C7,
who points us towards a passage written
by Jean-Paul Sartre about anti-Semites
that smacks remarkably of the rhetorical tricks of trolls.
It's a really interesting read.
This passage is from Sartre's book "Anti-Semite and Jew,"
an exploration of the etiology of hate.
It's good food for thought.
And last but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these media encoders
and decoders.
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