Well, this definitely was some dense
reading. Unfortunately, I fear that much of the material discussed
here flew way over my head. Here is what I managed to take away from
Encoding/Decoding by Stewart
Hall and Technology and Society by
Raymond Williams. When deciding on a message to send, it is important
to be aware of a few very important things or else the message you
are trying to send can and probably will be misunderstood. The essay
by Stewart Hall was mostly about this concept of creating the right
message so that what you want to get across is the same thing that
others see when they view your message. It is all about working with
connotations of words and with the things people are generally
familiar with simply from consuming media and observing the world
around them. Personally, I find that my communication is often
misconstrued and in my experience, the line between having a simple
conversation with someone and offending someone is a fine line
indeed.
The
essay by Raymond Williams was more about television and how it
affects us today. This is what I was able to understand from it, at
least. I personally don't care much for television. Before I came to
Ringling, I watched it a lot, but now the internet has replaced my
television and I suspect the same can be said for many people with
internet access. In fact, I think that this whole television debate
will soon become obsolete and the internet will replace it. Most
people use the internet like television already and it would be
pretty crazy to talk about television and the internet without
mentioning torrents and how easy it is to find television shows for
free. I doubt that this will be going away any time soon. I think the
internet will be in our living room instead of cable television and I
think this change is already happening.
