Encoding The Message Through Different Mediums

Examining the situation of you have gone to see the Maple Leafs play the Montreal Canadians and you return home to find that your roommates were not lucky enough to get tickets to this game, and were instead forced to watch it at home on an old television set whose picture is anything but clear. Even though the Canadians beat the Leafs, you still feel as though the experience of going to game was very enjoyable, but your roommates were disgusted with both the loss and your obvious satisfaction with the quality of your evening.

Let’s use the theorist Marshall McLuhan and Stuart Hall. Watching the game live is a different experience in which the viewers feels the excitement of the game happening in front of his/her eyes, while watching viewing it from a television has a different effect such as dealing with the broadcaster who’s voice is the main focus on the TV. The Television quality also plays a role in this factor as it’s the medium which was used to the watch the game. This case scenario can be seen from encoding/decoding point of view. Encoding is the way the audience receives the message and decoding is to extract the meaning of the message. Both watching the game live and watching the game on a television has a different way the message is received.

In a Television the message is received through the announcer and clips of the game shown, while watching the game live, the viewer gets to experience it all at once. The emotions and excitement within the crowd. The viewers watching from home have to do a lot more encoding because there is a less of a feel for it, they have to imagine that they are there and how the game is broadcasted plays a big role, there are also multiple people viewing the game and each person has a different opinion on the game being viewed. They view the game as the point of the view from the camera’s operator and the broadcaster’s announcement. They have to decode the game from these variables while the viewer at the stadium decodes the message from where he or she is sitting and the crowd. The viewer also gets a better quality compared to the viewers watching from home thus providing a better experience in just being there. The Television plays a major role on how the game is experienced as such McLuhan states that the Medium is the Message.

In this Case the Medium is the Televion, and since the medium was not suitable the way the message was received was poor. The experience of watching the game was already decided before the game would have begun the quality of the viewing experience was not right, while viewing the game live, plays a whole new experience one better other. They experience the game live, they have the option to watch any part of the game versus being limited to what the camera can show on the television. They are limited while being at the game the viewer has the freedom of choosing what he or she can view.

Each Viewer encodes the message through different mediums and decodes it differently there are a lot of factors in play here and can affect the outcome of the end results the fact that the viewers at home has a undesirable medium to view the message affected on enjoying the game even though their favorite team lost. While the Viewer at the Stadium had a wonderful time despite their favorite team not winnings was a result of how he or she encoded the message through the medium of being there live. Each theorist Hall and McLuhan had different views on the case but they both directly relate to each other because in order to encode the message the viewer needs the medium to receive it only then he or she can decode it.