There is a Chinese economic talk show named Brainstorm, which is famous for its all-sided design. Let me just take one edition for example— what is the future of the brick-and-mortar bookstores? . With a short video, which is the encoding part of this program, sending the message that the brick-and-mortar bookstores face a lot of difficulties recently and probably do not have a bright future. Firstly, the host asked for the opinions of the owners of brick-and-mortar bookstores and online book retailers. It is obvious that the owners hold an optimistic opinion for the brick-and-mortar bookstores, but the online retailers do not. Then some commentators argued that both brick-and-mortar bookstore and online bookstore have advantages and need to reform.
According to Encoding, Decoding written by Stuart Hall (1973), there are three hypothetical positions of decoders, to be exact, the receivers. The first one is the dominant-hegemonic position, ‘perfectly transparent communication’, as Hall stated, which means that the viewer receives the information exactly as the sender means and agrees with it. Negotiated code or position is the second one, which contains both adaptive and oppositional opinions. The last one is the oppositional code, which means that the receiver’s understanding of the information is contrary to the sender.
Although most of the viewers are from the negotiated position, there are still a large number of people who hold the dominant-hegemonic or the oppositional code. This talk show, just like a debate, perfectly meet needs of all kinds of the viewers. With the same encoding—the message sent by the short video, people have different understandings and opinions because of different ages, genders, etc. If the Brainstorm only invited online retailers to ask for their opinions, this show would be extremely one-sided, which might lead to the loss of audiences. But by inviting holders of brick-and-mortar bookstores, online retailers and economic commentators, whatever position the viewer holds, he or she has one side to agree with. The viewer with the oppositional position will agree with the opinion of the owners of brick-and-mortar bookstores, while the one with the dominant-hegemonic position support the online trailers and the viewer has negotiated position agrees with the commentators.
A media object should cover all the opinions the viewers might have, who decode the information with three possible positions—dominant-hegemonic position, negotiated code or oppositional code. One another possible way for the media object is to provide some specific ways for the viewers to state their different ideas. By doing so, a media object can be integrated well-rounded, in order to attract more audiences.