Posts - nicholas carah

In October 2016, after Trump mentioned Chinese economic policy in the debate, Fox News reporter Jesse Watters went to New York’s Chinatown to discuss the election. He interviewed residents who could not speak English and made fun of their lack of response to his election questions. In between clips of Watters laughing at elderly people were clips from kung fu films, and clips of Waters himself doing karate, getting a foot massage and bowing at Asian people.

The point of the segment was to present Chinese immigrants in the US as uninterested and uninformed about the upcoming election, and ultimately exclude them from a larger American cultural identity.

Comedian Ronny Chieng, a senior correspondent for The Daily Show, responded to the Fox News coverage in an expletive filled segment that went viral. After identifying every racist cultural frame, word and image in the Fox News segment and decoding them in plain language for audiences.

The recording examines how Chieng acknowledged not just stereotypes that were engaged to represent Chinese people and Asian communities at large (pointing out that karate is Japanese) but also how Watters structured the segment. Watters only posed questions about the election to elderly Chinese residents in a language they could not understand, while those who could speak English were asked about karate.

Chieng is quick to show that the segment relied on putting interviewees in a position where they could not respond to or consent to the show’s representations. Here Chieng brings up still photos of Watters and screams assumptions based on Watter’s appearance as a general douchebag (for example, that Watters drugs women’s drinks at bars). Chieng demonstrates how anyone in the right context can be rendered passive, can be defined by cruel stereotypes for laughs. 

But the real strength of Chieng’s critique, besides decoding an onslaught of racist messaging, is in his ability to demonstrate how the segment could more accurately represent Chinese-Americans if encoded differently.

Media mostly exercise power by enabling the creation and circulation of ideas we take to be ‘common-sense’. This notion of ‘common-sense’ ideas can be understood as ‘hegemony’:

Societies are cohesive when a particular way of life and its associated ideas are taken as common sense by a population. Powerful groups are hegemonic when their preferred ideas seem natural and inevitable.

In this recording we consider writer Helen Razer's take on how social media are used to police what meanings are taken as ‘common-sense’, to very clearly judge what can and can’t be said.

Notes | Quotes from Helen Razer's 'From Hipsters to Racists, everyone suffers the 'idiot reflex' of outrage' in Crikey, 27 January 2016.

The power to control the processes through which meaning is made, circulated, and made sense of matters.

Controlling representation matters because it shapes how people understand the world, which affects how they act in the world.

Here, Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model is particularly important.  The Encoding/Decoding model was particularly important as part of a turn toward ‘active audiences’ or ‘reception theory’ in the 1970s. This turn paid attention to who audiences were ‘active participants’ in making sense of and incorporating media representations into their everyday practices and identities.

The claim was that media had to be understood as a social process, and that meant that the meanings of media representations could not be understood by simply ‘analysing’ the text (what was on the screen or in the image), but had to be understood by going and observing how audiences, or receivers, of representations made sense of them. Critically important, was the claim that there was no ‘single’ meaning in a text, but that the same text could have different meanings to different audience members because they used their differing positions in the social and cultural world to make sense of media.

Hall’s encoding/decoding model was first published in the early 1970s. His claim was that while some people have more power to control the resources used to create meanings, and the structures and spaces where meanings circulate; no one has complete control over how meanings are encoded and decoded.

Powerful groups have the capacity to control media institutions and technologies, and the resources to employ and direct professional communicators.

That level of control only gets them so far, because representations work discursively. Once produced, messages have to be circulated. They become meaningful when incorporated into social practices and institutions. Institutions can’t entirely control those social practices.

In the recording we examine some of the key claims in Hall's encoding/decoding essay.

A text is not a literal text, but in Semiotics refers to a combination of signs, signifieds and mechanisms like metonymy. A text could be a sentence, a paragraph, an image, a story, or a collection of stories.

A collection of signs in a single photograph or painting, a video clip, a television show, a feature film. Whenever signs come together in the land of semiotics, they become texts. These texts can be understood, rearranged and put together in different combinations, with different meanings to different groups of people.

Cultural texts refer to sign systems, storytelling tools and symbols that contribute and shape a society’s culture. They have underlying cultural meanings. They either require certain cultural knowledge to be understood, they are produced through a certain cultural context or, as most texts do, become representative of a culture and its values.

But cultural texts are not one-dimensional. A text is not simply representative of one culture, it does not belong to one culture, even if it purposefully excludes others semiotically. Cultural texts are multi-dimensional, they are dynamic.

A cultural text is perhaps better understood as having cultural layers of understanding. Where groups different in age, race, nationality, sexual orientation may read and understand a collection of signs in different ways. Depending on the producer or the audience, the text itself has a kind of flexibility in meaning to different people when it starts to operate culturally.

Semiotics more generally poses a number of questions in regards to cultural texts and the stories they tell.  Questions like what makes a cultural text in the first place? What is defined by a cultural text, what is included and what is excluded? How are cultural texts used to represent society at large? How do cultural texts even become representative? What do signs signify culturally, and how and why do they become symbolic in the first place.

Music producer and former diplomat Glynn Washington, inspired by This American Life radio host Ira Glass created the radio show Snap Judgment.

Washington has been praised for drawing a more diverse and younger audience to talk radio and podcasting, mediums that had previously been associated with middle aged white men.

Snap Judgment is a storytelling program following the format of This American Life, telling a series of stories along the same theme. Like Glass, Washington opens each episode with an almost bombardment of signs and signifieds to hook the audience, layered in connotations and denotations, while leaning on music to keep the show’s meta-linguistic momentum.

Washington himself opens each show with a story from his life, introducing the theme for the hour.  Washington is African-American, raised in Detroit, and has worked as an educator, diplomat and activist in addition to a radio producer. Washington as the show’s host draws on his experiences growing up in Detroit and his experiences travelling internationally as part of his diplomatic work.

Washington’s program draws on his personal experiences as an African American man living and working in America and as a diplomat travelling around the world. As a result, his program engages a number of sign and signifieds that are particularly meaningful to different groups of people, both in African American communities and globally. Washington opens the episode 'Homecoming Surprise' like this:

When he describes his ex-girlfriend as ‘beautiful like Whitney Houston before the darkness’, we can infer that she was a beautiful African American woman.  Houston before she lost her battle with drug addiction. Within African American communities, ‘Whitney before the darkness’ is a cultural sign whose signifieds are perhaps more detailed.  Whitney Houston in the 1980s was the quintessential good girl.  A girl that was good at everything, that was maybe too good for you to be with. Since this reference to a good innocence may be lost on an international audience, Washington follows it up with a description of his girlfriend’s ‘white lace dress’ another sign of purity, to maybe keep us all on board with who this woman is and what she represented to him.

Both Snap Judgment and This American Life operate as cultural texts and engage a variety of signs and signifieds as part of their storytelling. But there are a few crucial points of difference.

One point of difference is that all of the stories on Snap Judgment address people around the world making a crucial life decision. The show’s stories are global in scope. This American Life although broadcasted globally, is primarily interested in contributing to a more dynamic American cultural identity. It tends to select stories narrated by Americans, and if it is an international story, it relates back to American foreign policy in some way.

In the structure of storytelling, Snap Judgment aims to go directly to a story’s arc, directly to the point of tension where a person must make a decision that impacts the course of their life and the lives of others.

Past stories featured on the show have included the story of a 1970s rock band in Zimbabwe, a British woman who responds to a personal ad to live with a complete stranger on an island in the Torres Strait, to American magicians attempting to do the dangerous bullet catch trick.

A second point of difference is the show’s reliance on a staff of audio engineers, producers and story contributors diverse in age, race and nationality. This operates in many ways to diversify the show’s reading as a cultural text.

The music itself guides the story along, or provides a rhythm to the story subject’s particular way of speaking. Washington describes the show’s elaborate audio production as a crucial part of their approach to storytelling:

Washington is particularly interested in developing a kind of semiotic rhythm where the words spoken by different storytellers are given their own unique rhythm that preserves their voice, their individuality.

This brings us to a third point of difference when comparing both programs as cultural texts. Personal, individual narration is a key component to Snap Judgment’s success. When Washington warns to ‘get out of the way’ of your interview subjects, as a producer, he sees the value in presenting a diverse set of physical voices and experiences to his audience.

Cultural texts are influenced not only by the cultural backgrounds of the audience but the producer as well, or the storyteller in this case. 

When Washington describes the process of ‘translating’ as an interviewer in radio, he is describing the process of re-stating or reframing semiotically the voice and meaning of your subjects’ statements, signs and signifieds.

We are either translating culturally, reframing certain signs into a relatable cultural context. Or we are translating, most likely, to make the subject’s voice, demeanor, or words more media friendly, more culturally mainstream, or more entertaining.

Snap Judgment and This American Life both emerge as cultural texts in their own right, and both contribute to cultural identity. However, their boundaries as cultural texts are drawn differently.

While This American Life consists of predominantly white middle aged American producers and reporters including stories with diverse subjects, the strength in Washington’s program is that the voices themselves are as diverse as its subjects.

Through Washington’s personal narration alone, the program engages a number of signs and symbolic systems that are meaningful and specific to an African-American cultural experience in ways that may not resonate with a wider global audience.

But at the same time, Washington’s diplomatic experiences, along with the widespread popularity of the program and the diversity of its contributors - as audio engineers, as storytellers - the program also contributes to a larger uniquely American identity, but also a global one.

It emerges as an American cultural text contributing to narratives of struggle, success and collective identity through shared personal experiences.

But it also emerges as a global pop cultural text in the personal sharing of stories from around the world.