Encoding/decoding.

Today I'm thinking about what Stuart Hall said about the dominant reading and the negotiated reading and all that stuff because there's never just one way of interpreting things, no matter how much someone makes an effort to make it that way.

We tested this out at school. We all watched the same news report and then everyone had to say what they got out of it, what the message was, and though most people said more or less the same thing, we came up with eight distinct messages, some at odds with each other.

But they're not all the same. There's usually one 'correct' one, one particular way of reading or seeing things that the creators had in mind when they were creating the thing. In order to understand that particular reading, you often have to position yourself as a member of the audience that the thing was intended for, which usually isn't all that hard, especially if you're white and middle class.

If you have different values or you don't see yourself included with the audience in some way it can be harder. If for some reason the message "you are the kind of person this message was intended for, so naturally you agree with what I'm saying," doesn't resonate with you, you can either reject it outright or negotiate with it, accepting it in part and coming to your own conclusions.

I don't really need to explain it, because we've all been there. Sometimes you read things and they resonate with you and you agree wholeheartedly with what's being said and sometimes you read something and you disagree with every fibre of your being. Much of the time you may feel something in the middle.

What the hell am I doing talking about this anyways? I guess because I'm reading a book right now called The Time Traveller's Wife that my mom lent to me and it's about (surprise surprise) a guy who travels through time and is in love with and eventually marries a girl. Not the sort of thing I would normally read, but my mom lent it to me and she's known to have good taste in literature, and from the first page it's a pretty engaging book.

Well, engaging up until the time when they get married and there's a long boring section about preparing for the wedding, which is followed by a hundred pages in which they have a lot of trouble trying to conceive. If I was a normal girl, it would be touching and heartbreaking and I would feel their pain and longing but I'm not so it's boring.

And I know that it's me and not the book, because the writing hasn't changed and the characters haven't changed and it's the same book and the same story. It's just that I'm supposed to read it in a particular way and I can't bring myself to do that. Maybe my brain's just wired wrong.