Blog 6

How would Stuart Hall respond to the question: How does L&O affect the audience in terms of ideology?

For Stuart Hall, the communication of meaning in a television show begins with the encodings of the show's creators -- the intentions of the producers, writers and actors as encoded and represented in the visuals and language of the show. These encodings exist in a cultural framework, and contain both the relative explicit denotation of the words spoken and the associative connotation of all that is seen and heard, as understood by the show's creators. What is actually communicated, however, depends on how the viewer decodes the "visual and aural" signs that make up the shows "discourse" (Hall 511). The decoding will be to some extent limited by what is encoded but can still vary widely among people and be at odds with some of the intentions of the creators. The encodings generally operate -- and this is certainly true in Law & Order -- within a "dominant code" (Hall 515), a set of common and broadly institutionalized signs and meanings. Law & Order portrays the official and classical view of wrongdoing and the law: people who commit horrible crimes for varied but fairly traditional reasons, a police bureaucracy determined to discover the culprits and a legal system trying to convict them but also working with the constraints and struggles of the law, and the constant tension between what is just and what is legal, trying to be just while pushing the limits of what is legal as regards to confessions, searches, etc.

How the viewer responds to Law & Order, however, will depend on his or her own social framework. According to Hall, they may view the show within the same "dominant code" and accept the show more or less as it's presented. Viewers may also operate under the "negotiated code" (Hall 516), in which there is variation among the viewers' interpretation based on the viewer's situation. In the case of Law & Order, which has so many different personal situations and points of view -- disturbed or defiant criminals, aggressive or more complacent law officers, zealous prosecutors as well as more balanced prosecutors and judges -- different individuals may interpret "Law" and "Order" differently based on their own corresponding position or inclinations, sometimes embracing and sometimes rejecting a character or situation and what may be the intended encoding. Finally, some viewers, according to Hall, may decode the show "in a globally contrary way" and view the show with an opppositional reading. This last set of viewers would mostly reject the show's basic 'law and order' framework for "an alternatvie framework of referecne" (Hall 517). This could be the interpretation of a criminal, or any particular individaul who is fundamentally at odds with the rules of American law or the way they are enforced in our culture.