The Last Day on Earth: Encoding and Decoding of Resistant Ideology in Music Video

According to Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding, an audience member, based on their individual ideological perspectives, can read media texts in one of three ways: dominant, negotiated, or resistant. Hall’s theory, however, also implies that the producer will always encode a dominant or hegemonic message. Given semantically messy texts like music videos, however, producers now have the freedom to either encode a dominant ideology or to resist it. In order for the audience to make sense of a resistant ideology, it must first be relevant to them. Their subject position, which includes personal experiences, as well as familiarity with other media texts and a combination of political, religious, and philosophical beliefs, adds to ideological relevancy. And the closer the audience member’s unique subject position falls in relation to the producer’s the greater the chance that they might read the resistant message as intended.