Hall and "Law and Order"

The way I see Stuart Hall answer how “Law and Order” affects the audience in terms of ideology comes down to how the show is encoded and decoded. For one, the encoding of “Law and Order” entails a specific message pertaining to the certain “institutional practices” and “organizational conditions” of the production. And with this message, the audience will decode it, constructing that message together to form some kind of meaning to them. And it is in this mode of communication where the most work is done, and sometimes a social identity is formed for a member of the audience.

Also, one must take in how the texts of “Law and Order” are broadcasted, whether or not they are intended to be “open” or “closed” texts. Hall would probably say that the show offers a more “closed” text because “Law and Order” tends to have a more heterogeneous audience since diverse decodings occur more.

But I believe Hall’s overall stance on this topic would be that the role of social positioning of mass media texts by different social groups would be mixed. Some people would tend to have a more dominant reading because the way in which the audience interprets the messages. These typical audience members would be absolute fans of the show, and people who believe that the code is either “natural” or “transparent” (the show doesn’t fall out of the realm of disbelief). The negotiated reading of the show is shared by the audience which allows the message to be interpreted in a very limited way. In this way, the viewers probably accept the show but add their own interpretation to modify their position. The viewers who understand the show but directly oppose the reading accept the last type of reading: oppositional. This may be because of a political affiliation associated with the show or some strong moral value.