After doing some deeper thinking about the topic of my group’s final project I began to reflect on how encoding and decoding behave in this new age of online entertainment. I mainly focused my efforts on understanding how the decoding process has changed through online discussion, reaction channels, theory channels, etc. In particular, I love watching theory channels on Youtube, it allows me to rewatch old shows/movies through a different lens. However, I find myself decoding the text in different ways than I did the first time around, all of a sudden things have different meanings. Yet at the same time I am aware that I did not formulate that reading on my own, instead this new reading was achieved through influence from someone else’s interpretation of the text.
So where does that put me in the context of decoding? Do I still hold a dominant reading because that is what my individual interpretation of the text is? Or do I hold an oppositional reading of the text because I am choosing to go in a completely different direction with the new ideas I gathered from someone else’s negotiated reading?
The placement of my interpretation becomes really complex when we take into account that I am decoding the text through someone else’s decoding of that same text. The inclusion of this theory channel in my decoding process makes the act of decoding a whole lot more complex. Before watching the video from this channel I held a dominant reading but now my reading has changed as a direct result of the theory channel. I like to think of this as a new type of reading, an influential reading one could say. As the world becomes more distanced from reality and moves onto a virtual platform people are becoming more distanced from each other. The lack of a defined programming structure results in people not watching the same shows at the same time as their friends. This leads to them looking for places to discuss their views, such as online threads, Youtube videos, blogs, and many more. Sometimes this leads to people, like me, who are influenced by the ideas of others and, due to easily accessible media, they are able to rewatch that show with a plethora of new perspectives.
I like to think that this new reading is isolated from the original reading much like secondary, yet unique, reading. At the same time though, I am able to make my own new ideas through this new lens. I like to think about it like borrowing someone’s notes from class, going to class with those notes, and adding on stuff they may have missed or going deeper on certain sections. The main takeaway is, decoding has become a whole lot more complex and is evolving along with television.
