Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams

I was told that these readings would be difficult to get through. I love to read, but I've never been very good at something as dense as the essays given to us to analyze. I regret missing the class where we discussed them as well, because perhaps I would have a better idea of what they were trying to get across. However, I did a bit more research, and I think I've managed to at least decode them enough to get the general ideas both were trying to communicate.

Stuart Hall's essay was the more difficult of the two for me. However, what I think he was saying was that television presents us with something that can be described as an encoded message, and it is up to the audience to decode that same message. To be entirely honest, I'm not even sure if that's correct. But if that is what he was saying, it makes sense. All media is just a message that the audience can interpret for themselves. This isn't something that applies to television and television alone. It also relates back to radio, movies, advertising, magazines, music, and any other commercial media that we take in daily, whether or not we're aware of it.

The Williams essay made a bit more sense to me. It mainly discussed the effect television had on society, and how this new technology would change our world whether we liked it our not. This is absolutely something I agree with. Television, and computers, and the internet, have changed our social norm in a way that it is almost unrecognizable from that of fifty, forty, thirty, even twenty years ago.

During my internship at Sony this past summer, we listened to the CEO of Sony Entertainment give a speech. He said that one day, he was watching his child play with a digital tablet. He then looked around the room, and was rather shocked when he noticed something. Years ago, when he had been the age his son was now, the house he had lived in had looked almost identical to the one that his mother had lived in when she was young. Now, it was nearly unrecognizable. Phones, television, internet, HD surround sound, laptops, gaming systems, tablets, touch screens, you name it. Technology and television have completely changed our lives. Is this for the better? I think it's both "yes" and "no". We are more connected around the globe than we have ever been before in the history of the world, but at the same time, we are also growing more and more distant from our immediate family. I hope that this is something we can fix later on.