This page contains links to a series of animations and recordings related to the book Media & Society: Power, Platforms & Participation and Media & Society: Production, Content & Participation (2015) and the course Media & Society at The University of Queensland.
Together with the team at UQx we created four animations that set out key foundational ideas in the course.
Communicator, Medium, Receiver
Models of communication describe both a ‘social’ and ‘technical’ process. The social process is the creation and circulation of meaning among people. The technical process is the engineering of systems - media infrastructure and technologies - that capture, store, distribute and process information. To study communication is to understand both these processes and how they relate to one another.
Communication is a socio-technical process of engineering systems for the transmission of information over time and space, and then using those systems to circulate the ideas and meanings that create a shared sense of the world.
Political and economic elites began to pay attention to this process, and invest in it, because they knew that if you could shape how people understand the world, you could shape how they act in the world.
The academic disciplines of media, communication and cultural studies are always concerned with this irreducible aspect of the human experience: we create a social world by storing information outside our bodies in media, we use media to create and share meanings with one another.
A social history of media technologies
The history of media has symbolic, technical and digital eras. Through history we can observe how media technologies are bound up in the creation of new kinds of social, economic and political formations.
The industrial production of meaning
By the turn of the twentieth century mass societies began to organise the process of communication on an industrial-scale. Media and culture industries shaped the flow of ideas in society by exerting control over each of the moments in the process of communication. One of the major changes in human society over the past century is that our day-to-day communication with one another has become more and more deeply entangled with industries that seek to control, shape and profit from it. Bit by bit, what we see the is creation of mechanisms for controlling each moment in the process of communication: communication, message, medium and reception.
Encoding/Decoding
In a mass society 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. 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.