Mass Media

Originally posted for “Media Language & Society” class 2/24/10

Hegemony:

A search of Google Images for “American Hegemony’ resulted in this map:

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/usaworld.htm

displaying the growth in the distribution of US troops throughout the world from 1989-2003. The page also includes a chart showing the relative military spending by the nations of the world in 2003. Incredibly, the US spends nearly HALF of all military spending in the world. This should be a fairly clear indication that American imperialism is alive and well, and that we’re exerting our influence and power now more than ever before (well, at least more than we were in 1989.)

Dominant Meaning:

I stumbled of this image on the web, of a female McDonald’s worker in Egypt, who has a red hijab as a part of her McDonald’s uniform:

Now, regardless of what you think about women wearing burkas, this photograph is interesting in that it is clearly juxtaposing 2 cultures in one outfit, but the inclusion of the burka seems ridiculous, and almost condescending to local culture and religion. The McDonalds-ness of the uniform seems overpowering of any local culture they tried to ‘incorporate’ – making it all the more offensive.

Then, out of curiosity, I checked out the McDonalds Egypt website:

http://www.mcdonaldsegypt.com/

Which is far more American looking than Egyptian, with the exception that there’s Egyptian names for the sandwiches, and even those have the American names written (in bold) underneath.

Context:

For my reference to context, I chose this trailer of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker:”

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/dor/objects/893478/hurt_locker/videos/hurtlocker_trlr_041609.html

Now, as much as I hated this film, I think that it represents the beginning of our culture trying to contextualize the Iraq war in order to make sense of it. So much of what we know about this war was fed to us by the mass media and, as we know now, key pieces of data were kept from us by our government. Although the initial invasion was almost seven years ago, I think our lack of understanding of the war has created an anxiety that we’re now starting to express culturally. By placing the war in the context of what it meant to individual soldiers and their families, we are beginning to create a narrative for ourselves that makes more sense than the one we were fed.

Encoding:

Encoding and decoding seem similar to the idea of semiotics – encoding meaning into images, news, and other kinds of media meant to convey a message beyond what meets the eye.

As an example, I found this story on the Fox News website about beauty pageant queens who oppose same-sex marriage:

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2010/02/23/miss-beverly-hills-lauren-ashley-same-sex-marriage-carrie-prejean/?test=faces

While this arguably shouldn’t even be called “news,” it seems clear that the message encoded in this story is one that implies that gay marriage is not just wrong, but it’s un-American as well. If these wholesome American ideals (who are so ‘good’ that they even retain their virginity until marriage) think that it’s wrong, then you should too. It also creates a situation where one WANTS to identify with these women because of their “beauty” that we are trained to place such a high value on in our culture.

Decoding:

This one was tougher, as I feel like encoding and decoding are simply opposite sides of the same coin. For this example, I chose this website that gives a lesson plan for teachers on how to teach a class on decoding advertising:

http://www.youthxchange.net/main/e_cw_007.asp

Being able to decode media messages is obviously a main objective of media literacy education. We’re more inundated with media and advertising today than ever before, and it’s critical that kids are educated to be able to deconstruct the media that bombards them, to understand the messages, decode them, and think critically about them.

Tagged as: language, Mass Media, MLS

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