Read excerpt from the following chapter from Carah: This chapter a

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What are texts and signs?*

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In this chapter we consider the uses of media in:

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What is representation?

What is the relationship between representation and power?

How does representation work as a social process?

• Making sense of social reality • Crafting and mediating identities and social life • Managing power relationships.

tfimWWW MATTERS BECAUSE HOW WE UNDERSTAND THE WORLD AFFECTS HOW WE

ACT TN THE WORLD.

MLCIA ANDSCXIETY

REPRESENTATION AND POWER

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Representation is the social process of making and exchanging meaning (Hall 1997). Media do not simply reflect or mirror reality. Media are social processes through which people interact with each other to construct a view of reality. These social interactions unfold between people with different levels of access to economic, cultural and symbolic resources, institutions and rituals. By social construction of reality, we mean that reality as we understand it is produced out of social relationships between people. There is a real world out there, with real material things in it and events that actually happen, but we can only come to understand that world out of the social process of interacting with each other. There is no understanding of reality outside our social interactions and cultural practices. The ‘re’ prefix in representation is important. It is a process of re-presenting reality to others. Representations are social productions: their meaning depends on who creates and circulates them, the cultural schema within which that circulation takes place, and who receives them. Some people have more power to shape not only particular meanings, but also the contexts within which meanings are produced, distributed and received.

Media representations shape how people think about and act in the world. Representations also have significant affective dimensions. They anticipate, construct and amplify how we feel about things. They reinforce or challenge our attitudes. They arouse our emotions: fear, passion, anxieties. Representation is not simply a rational process of creating and circulating inert bits of information. The question is not always about whether or not representations are accurate, but how they subtly frame events in ways that position individuals in the social order. We are interested in how representations mediate relations between people. Relations between people are complex and messy, and are constituted as much by how we feel, and our relative level of power towards each other, as they are by empirical facts.

Representation is a process embedded in how we make sense of the world and in doing so it shapes the world. Representation does this subtly and over a long period of time. Images and narratives do not have meaning on their own. They only become meaningful in relation to other images and narratives that have preceded them or that they are produced in relation to. As groups of people attempt to ‘fix’ particular representations, other groups will attempt to create different ones. In doing so they are making claims on how we ought to make sense of, and act in, the world. A foundational question to consider is the extent to which representations portray the world ‘as it actually is’.

One response to this question is that representations can never be finally fixed. This view centres the possibilities opened up by continuous, open-ended meaning making. The capacity of humans to create new meanings, and new ways of seeing the world, opens up the possibility that power relationships can be continuously rearranged via meaning making. The challenge for this way of thinking about meaning making is how to distinguish one meaning as better or more plausible than another. Critics point out that not all meanings are equal; some will work better at explaining material reality.

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Texts and signs

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Another response to this question, then, is that powerful groups aim to fix meanings. This is a complex process that unfolds over time. When groups have power, they can fix meaning; however, as other groups acquire power, they may be able to unfix and create new meanings. This is not a teleological process. Each new set of meanings is not necessarily better than the last. Importantly, this position retains the view that we can distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ meanings by judging them against our engagement with and experiences in the world. This view is characterized by humans who make and defend judgements about the value and truth of meanings. It is useful in connecting representation with power. If representation is the social process of making meaning about our shared social reality, then we can go on to say that representation matters because how we understand the world affects how we act in the world. Powerful groups aim to synchronize the social process of making sense of the world with our experience of the world.

Humans make sense of the world and their relationships with others by making and using symbols. When we walk down a street in a new city, looking for somewhere to eat, we peer in shop windows, glance at menus, even look at the people eating and drinking inside. We pull our phone out and Google the place and look for reviews and ratings. We look for signs that the restaurant, caf6 or bar is a good one. What are these signs? It might be a recognizable brand logo, the style of dress of the customers, the average score of reviews online. These symbols signify to us how good the food and drinks will be. They shape our judgements and actions.

If representation is the social process of making and sharing meaning, then its basic building blocks are texts and signs. A sign is anything that produces meanings. A sign might be a word, an object, a logo, an item of clothing. The sign is the basic element around which the social process of meaning making unfolds. A text is a collection of signs. A text might be a story, an advertisement or a song. Making sense of cultural texts is a contextually specific social practice through which we arrive at an understanding of our world and our relationships with each other.

There are two dimensions of a sign: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the material form of the sign itself. It is the thing we look at or hear. The signified is what the signifier is taken to mean or communicate – that is, to signify. A neon-lit sign in a shop window with the letters O-P-E-N is a signifier; it signifies that the shop is open and customers are welcome to come in.

Semiotics is the study of symbolic meaning making – of the socially produced relationships between signifiers and signifieds. Some relationships between signifiers and signifieds are tightly bound. They don’t appear to require much consideration or debate. They don’t generate disagreement. If we were in a classroom and I wrote down the letters C-H-A-I-R on

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the board and asked everyone to point to this object in the room, everyone would point to the object with four legs that we were sitting on. The letters C-H-A-I-R are the signifiers and the thing we sit on is the signified. The relationship between signifier and signified is socially produced. Even though the relationship between the word ‘chair* and the object we sit on is tightly bound, there is no natural or intrinsic relationship between the two. There is nothing chair-like about the chair before humans come along and create that connection between word and object. The relationship between signifier and signified needs to be constructed and then shared among humans. Some meanings are so widely shared that they appear to be universally agreed upon. These meanings tend to work in their day-to-day mediation of relationships. Calling the object we sit on a chair generates no dispute as we go about our daily lives.

These apparently straightforward, literal relationships between signifiers and signifieds are denotative. More open-ended relationships between signifiers and signifieds are connotative. It’s often said that denotations are literal meanings and connotations are associative meanings, but that’s not strictly accurate. Even the most basic, seemingly inarguable meanings of a word are associations between a sign and an aspect of the world. If every sign sits at the centre of a nearly infinite field or spread of possible meanings, or potential associations, then denotative meanings are those which cluster most closely and densely around the sign. They are a sign’s most stable, immediately available and widely shared meanings; their link to the sign is so tight that the connection seems almost natural, like an objective truth. Denotation is the process by which the relationship between a sign and a certain set of meanings becomes naturalized (Thwaites et al. 2006: 60-65).

We can distinguish between denotative and connotative relationships between signifiers and signifieds. Denotative relationships are apparently straightforward, literal relationships, while connotative ones are more open-ended and associative. If I say ‘I’m going home’, the denotative meaning of home here literally means I am going to the building in which I live. If we work together and it is the end of the work day, my statement literally means I’m finished for the day and going to the place I live. Suppose I say ‘I’m going home’ and you know that I’m about to leave on a trip to visit my family, who live in another city. You might hear something much more associative in my statement. That by home I mean the place where my family is. Home might conjure up, for you or me, happy or sad associations. We might long to be back home, or we might have a complicated relationship with our home and family. Home can mean different things to different people. Suppose a politician says that a group of immigrants should ‘go home’. In this statement, the signifier ‘home takes on charged associations with race and national identity. The relationship between signifier and signified is a matter of political debate and contest. These associative and connotative relationships between signifiers and signifieds most readily illustrate the relationship between representation and power. They point us to the mode of po^er that s central to the media and cultural industries – the production of shared meaning5-

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Encoding/decoding

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Powerful groups attempt to naturalize associations between signifiers and signifieds that suit their interests, while groups seeking power attempt to contest these associations. To analyse the relationship between signifieds and signifiers is to carefully examine how we socially construct a shared social reality, and in doing so to reveal how these associations are embedded in power relationships.

In the previous chapter, we argued that a basic model of communication has four elements. At its most elementary, this basic model implies a linear process: a communicator creates a message and sends it through a medium to a receiver.

Imagine seeing a political advertisement on television or YouTube. The politician is the communicator. The television is the medium through which the images we see and words we hear travel. The viewer is the receiver. To recap our discussion in the previous chapter, the virtue of the communicator-medium-receiver model is its simplicity. But that simplicity is also a weakness. Critics call it a ‘magic bullet’ or ‘hypodermic needle’ model, as if the media simply injects meanings straight into the brains of receivers. But meaning isn’t something you receive, it’s something you play a part in creating. A communicator can intend for their message to mean whatever they like, but not all receivers will just agree with them. There are many receivers and they don’t all think alike.

The problem with a linear communicator-medium-receiver model is that it can’t account for the social nature of meaning making. The power to control the processes through which meaning is circulated and decoded matters. In the 1970s, the cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (1980) made a crucial intervention. In his famous encoding/decoding model, the construction of meaning takes place during both the encoding of a message by the communicator and the decoding of that message by its recipients or audience (Turner 2003). Hall’s model was part of a larger turn towards understanding audiences as ‘active participants’ in making sense of and incorporating media representations into their everyday practices and identities. Meaning could not be understood by simply ‘analysing’ the text and determining the relationships between signs and signifiers. Meaning had to be understood by observing how audiences, or receivers, of representations made sense of, and produced, relationships between signifiers and signifieds. Critically important was the claim that there was not a single meaning in a text, but that the same text could have different meanings to different audience members because they used their differing positions in the social and cultural world to make sense of media.

While some people have more power to control the resources used to create meanings, and the structures and spaces where meanings circulate, no one has complete control over how meanings are encoded and decoded. Powerful groups have the capacity to control media institutions and technologies, and the resources to employ and direct professional communicators.

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That level of control only gets them so far, because representations work discursively. Once produced, messages have to be circulated. They become meaningful when incorporated into social practices and institutions. Institutions can’t entirely control those social practices. The process of representation is contingent on the actors in each moment, and their relative power to influence or control others. The moments of‘encoding1 and ‘decoding’ messages are ‘relatively autonomous’(Hall 1980). For Hall, a television programme is produced within the institutional structures, technical infrastructure and production practices of a television network.

The way television producers encode messages is shaped by the way they anticipate how others will decode their messages. Few professional communicators want to be misunderstood by their audience, and most communicators need to pay attention to the power relations within which they are embedded. For a professional communicator working on a television news broadcast, for instance, they are most likely to anticipate how their messages will be perceived by political and corporate elites, on the one hand, and by their audience on the other. Their messages are discursively shaped by their sense of how they fit within a broader cultural hegemony that reflects both the interests of political and economic elites and the lived experience of mass audiences. Professionals pay careful attention to wider cultural discourses and power structures: the interests of political elites, corporate sponsors and advertisers, and audience feedback through ratings and market research. The producer isn’t an autonomous creator of a message, but rather is working at one interval in an ongoing process of representation. However, we might argue that they are working at a particularly influential interval. The messages they encode can be distributed to a mass audience, individuals in that audience can decode the messages in whichever way they like, but they are probably unlikely to be able to encode and distribute messages back to a large audience. Even though our media system is increasingly interactive, this remains a crucial distinction.

Audiences are made up of many individuals with different lived experiences of the world, and different priorities and values. They bring all this to bear on how they decode the messages they receive. Nevertheless, we live in societies where certain meanings are widely shared and agreed upon. So, cultural texts often have preferred meanings. The encoding/decoding model proposes three positions from which audiences decode the meaning encoded in a cultural text: the dominant or preferred position, a negotiated position and an oppositional one:

1. When the message is decoded as the encoder intended, the process of representation operates within a dominant hegemonic code. The social exchange constructed here is one of consent or agreement between encoder and decoder. The message attempts to be hegemonic in the sense that it claims its own truth and legitimacy; it achieves this hegemony where the decoder consents to that claim. The work of professional commu­ nicators is to encode messages in such a way that their claims are legitimized by others-

2. A negotiated process of representation takes place when the decoder understands quite well the claim to truth or legitimacy the encoder is making, but they resist

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Once a message is encoded and distributed it can only have an effect – influence, entertain, instruct or persuade – once it has been decoded. The meaning structure used to encode a message may not necessarily be the same as the meaning structures in which the message is decoded. Even though professional communicators might set the agenda and frame messages, they can’t ever guarantee what their readers and audiences will do with those messages. The process of representation is always open-ended to some degree. We must therefore always pay attention to what audiences do with representations, in addition to examining the messages themselves.

By thinking in terms of encoding and decoding, and by looking for examples of preferred, negotiated and oppositional reading, we can start to identify which groups are trying to maintain consensus and which groups are trying to disrupt it. Exercising power involves paying attention to both the moments of encoding and decoding, and the relationship between them.

Imagine you see a politician on television telling the public they should wear masks in public to prevent the spread of coronavirus. For this message to make sense and be effective, almost everyone has to understand the message and recognize its meaning. The politician wants you to agree with them. In the case of a direction to wear face masks, the dominant meaning is that face masks will prevent the spread of coronavirus if most people take up the practice. The message takes for granted that the coronavirus is a threat and all citizens have a part to play in preventing its spread. This is the ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ reading. The audience would implicitly recognize these as dominant social values. But texts rarely elicit a purely dominant or preferred reading. The most common response to a text is to take a ‘negotiated’ reading position. A negotiated reading is one where a viewer sees a public health message to wear a mask and agrees that the coronavirus is dangerous and that masks would prevent its spread, but might decide that because they aren’t at individual risk, they don’t need to wear a mask

consenting to the claim. The decoder acknowledges the legitimacy and power of the message at the same time they mark out their own position, adapting the message to their own local conditions and social relations. The capacity of the decoder to negotiate depends to some degree on their relative autonomy, power, and cultural and economic resources. Negotiated processes of representation demonstrate the messy and contingent nature of power. The decoder simultaneously acknowledges the exis­ tence of the power and legitimate dominant code and at the same time they resist it with whatever local resources they have available. Much communication, and the ongoing work of hegemony and representation, is about these everyday negotiations.

3. An oppositional exchange takes place where a decoder understands perfectly well the encoded message, but rejects it entirely. Oppositional decoding threatens to disrupt power relations. If a large group of people refuse to decode the intended message of the encoder, and that oppositional decoding is backed up by other economic, social and cul­ tural resources, it may be the sign of a hegemony breaking apart, or losing its legitimacy.

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themselves, or that the threat in their area is not significant enough for them to wear a mask, or that they only need to wear a mask if they are going on public transport or to a rally, or that wearing a mask feels uncool or a bit embarrassing. An oppositional reading of the message would be to understand but refute the politician’s claim that masks prevent the spread of coronavirus, or to refute that the coronavirus is even dangerous. Imagine a viewer who sees the message and immediately associates the call to wear a mask with excessive state power and the infringement of personal freedoms.

The encoding/decoding model helps us to think about the relationships between the social process of representation and the exercise of power. A powerful group might have the capacity to encode meanings and distribute them to large groups of decoders, but they face constraints. While meanings are not predetermined, encoders work within a social system dominated by already agreed-upon, preferred, ideas. This narrows the range of things that can be said. And encoders can’t control the decoding process. It is always possible that decoders will reject the preferred or dominant meanings. So, to some degree, power is distributed among encoders and decoders. Groups with power seek to keep the moments of encoding and decoding in sync in order to generate consent and agreement. Groups seeking power aim to disrupt this process, creating oppositional decoding, and make their own texts that encode alternative meanings.

Control over representation Hall’s model is useful for thinking about how in a society at any given time there is a complex process of meaning making and representation taking place. The process of encoding and decoding gives us a useful rubric for mapping out a variety of positions from which individuals and groups might have the capacity to encode, circulate, decode and recirculate messages.

Encoders with power are likely to have access to the means of communication from which they can create and distribute messages. Their messages are likely to be decoded as intended, and consented to, by those aligned to the ruling hegemony. They might also find other groups undertaking a negotiated decoding of the messages at local levels. This process of negotiation is part of managing hegemony, but doesn’t fundamentally disrupt it. These other groups might not be happy with the meanings, but they understand that in practice they need to consent to them.

In addition to encoders with power are encoders seeking to build power. These individuals and groups also largely operate within the ruling or dominant hegemony, but are seeking to negotiate a different position within that structure, to acquire more economic and cultural power. They are often perceived within the process of representation as an accepted part of the debate. What is taking place here is a continuing negotiation within a hegemonic structure that the various encoders and decoders largely agree upon. This process of encoders and decoders that are either aligned to the ruling hegemony, involved in a process of active negotiation within it or ambivalent about it, characterizes the representation process that most of us are familiar with on a day-to-day basis. A question for us to reflect on at any given historical moment is whether

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MEDIA AND SOCIETY

of engagement are set and maintained via struggles

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEANING AND POWER: IDEOLOGY, DISCOURSE AND HEGEMONY

the power relationships that organize the cultural and political processes we are embedded in are in dispute or whether groups are negotiating and jostling for resources. In recent years, with the rise of right-wing populist leaders and movements that challenge some of the fundamental tenets of globalization, such as free trade and immigration, we might view these as struggles taking place within the established power structures of liberal-democratic capitalism, or we might view them as a fundamental rewriting of hegemonic ideas and institutions.

Distinct from dominant and negotiated processes of representation are those societies and historical moments characterized by encoders and/or decoders opposed to the riding hegemony. Any society at any given time will have individuals and groups fundamentally opposed to the ruling hegemony. The presence of these encoders/decoders is often registered in our culture as disruptive forms of communication that undermine the established common sense, undo shared narratives and undermine collective identities, as much as they might assert their own ideas. These kinds of encoders/decoders might be more tactically adept at generating cultural chaos than cultural consensus. For the process of representation, this opposition is only of consequence if those groups are able to gain access to the means of communication through which to create and distribute messages, and if there are corresponding groups who will decode their messages as intended. That is, if they have the capacity to create, circulate and have their messages made meaningful by others.

Powerful groups attempt to control meaning. In some places and times those attempts will be successful. The meanings they produce and circulate will acquire a hegemonic dominance. That is, they will come to be seen as common sense or true. As we have already argued, though, meaning is not entirely controllable, immutable or fixed. Humans will actively read, interpret and decode meanings. Despite the efforts of dominant groups, their attempts to control meaning will always be susceptible to resistance and the possibility that new meanings will emerge.

Efforts to control meaning are related to competition over material and cultural resources. Human society is characterized by scarce resources. Our life chances are set by the share of material and cultural resources we gain access to. As long as there are insufficient resources to satisfy all, struggles will occur between groups and individuals. Central to the nature and outcomes of such struggles are the rules of engagement. That is, the acceptable terms on which competition over resources will be undertaken. In a liberal-democratic capitalist society, individuals cannot simply go and forcibly acquire the wealth of others. There are myriad laws and institutions that govern the ownership and production of wealth. These rules

> over meaning. Powerful groups seek to

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use meanings to set rules that are favourable to them. Ideology, discourse and hegemony are each an idea that theorizes the relationship between meaning and power.

The concept of ideology offers a framework for thinking about how the rules and parameters of social life are established and maintained. An ideology is a system of ideas and meanings that we use to make sense of the world and our relationships with one another. We commonly use the term ‘ideology’ to refer to the beliefs of another person and the values or principles upon which they make decisions and act. It is often used with a negative connotation. When one politician calls another an ‘ideologue’ they insinuate that they are guided by certain beliefs which prevent them seeing how things really are. This everyday use captures some aspects of the idea. Implied here is the notion that there are right and true or wrong and distorted meanings or ways of seeing the world. And that when the powerful attempt to control meanings, what they do is distort those meanings in order to create a view of an issue that suits their interests, rather than create meanings that represent how things actually are. This way of thinking assumes that someone has corrupted an ideal form of communication and prevented others from seeing the ‘right’ meanings. It posits that there is an actual and final truth that exists and that we can find it.

At its most elementary, the critical understanding of ideology is captured in the formula: ‘they know not what they do’. That is, people only act as they do because they don’t understand how things really are. For instance, we might say that people only consent to the way our liberal democracy works because we don’t fully appreciate that rather than empower us as citizens, as we are always told, it in fact protects an economic system that enables the rich to pro

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