success overnight

Yesterday when I was doing my blog post, my mom burst into my room & told me to watch this video. This is a clip of a show called "Britain's Got Talent," which is kind of like American Idle. In this particular clip, a 47 year old woman (Susan Boyle) is featured singing her chosen part. When she begins to sing, the audience is speechless because when she walked in, she had absolutely no star power. But the contrast of her appearance and her great voice made her an instant success who stood out. This show was originally aired in Britain, but this woman has recently become practically a house-hold name. This just goes to show the magnitude to which communication has grow throughout the years. 100 years ago, if someone became popular in another country, it was pretty much guaranteed that we would never hear about it, where as now, it has taken a matter of weeks for Boyle's success to spread world-wide.

Methods of Decoding

I’m not sure if I found Chapter Two not very interesting, or I found it hard to follow, or what, but I did not really like this chapter. I did, however, find it easy to understand the different modes of engagement which was introduced by Stuart Hall. These modes were dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional. In the book these modes were related to the television show American Idol, which I found interesting, so I messed around on the internet and I found this Mazda commercial:

and decided to apply the modes of decoding myself. In my opinion, a dominant-hegemonic reading of this commercial would be that the car is so nice that NO ONE would want to leave it. After some research I found that some people actually took an oppositional reading towards this commercial saying that the commercial was “was offensive and that women were being shown as sex objects”, claiming that the mannequins were becoming arouse (26 April, 2006; BBC News webpage). These complaints did not hold, however the controversy of the commercial and the mixed feelings stayed. In our book it states that being able to negotiate, when it comes t o images, is a key factor within a complex relationship consisting of producers and viewers. Even though it is impossible to please everyone within advertising, I think the negotiable way of looking at this commercial would be that the Madza commercial insinuated that the turn-on is really the car itself, with all its attributes, and a woman mannequin was the best way to describe that to avoid sexually exploiting women. What do you all think?