Values
The social and cultural context: whose stories count, what audiences assume, and how both drift over time.
- reference
- context-force
The assumptions a media product breathes
Production: the beliefs of the people and institutions making it — whose stories matter, what behaviour is normal, who gets to be complex. Reception: the beliefs audiences bring, which keep changing after the text is locked; the same film transforms as its audience's values do.
What to ask
What did the text's first audience take for granted that we don't — and vice versa? Which meanings have inverted with no frame changing?
Canonical cases
Psychoanalysis in postwar America — Psycho's psychiatrist scene received as authority in 1960, as irony since. The women's picture, 1974 — Alice made and received inside the women's movement, and argued over by it. Both are the Values force doing its slow work.
Sources
Mulvey — itself a values-context document; Criterion — At Home in the World.
In the books
The first hypothetical position is that of the dominant-hegemonic position. When the viewer takes the connoted meaning … full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded …
Hall, "Encoding/Decoding", hed 9. The negotiated position follows at hed 10, the oppositional at hed 11 — three ways the same text can be read, which is the mechanism behind Psychoanalysis in postwar America and The women's picture, 1974.
Representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture.
Hall, Representation, hall 15. The method for reading stereotyping — how difference gets fixed in place — is chapter 4, from about hall 223, though that part of the scan is OCR-rough.
For a classroom-length version of both, Media & Society covers mediation and representation at mas 69, ideology at mas 159 and hegemony at mas 177.