Law and Order

Law and Order is yet another of previously mentioned mainstream broadcasts that are sure to make professionals in its featured fields wince every once in a while. On air since the 1990’s, it has proliferated for decades despite this, because it disseminates (and creates) “dominant ideologies”. Law and Justice may not be the fast-paced, high-stakes game that the show portrays them as, but when its producers decided to ‘encode’ it with meaning, those are the values they perceived as having truth for themselves, their wallets, and the public eye. Since most people don’t actually work in the jobs portrayed on the show, the romanticized dissemination of those ‘codes’ merely taps into the culture’s ‘preferred’ interpretation. Law and order then affects its audience’s ideology by attempting to achieve ‘a perfectly transparent communication’ with its audiences: that is, it seeks to encode signs/connotations that is so widely accepted that viewers interpretations will perfectly match the meanings intended. When audiences agree to this, their ideology is accepted to be that of the ‘dominant hegemonic position’.

Not all people can decode – that is, ‘read’ the connotations into meaning – so “perfectly” however. Sometimes life experience creates for disagreements with widely accepted points of view. Audiences that can then understand the intended codes but seek to mold them into their own experiences can be said to have “negotiated readings” of the show. This will create for some conflicts. For example, if a viewer has had one or two experiences in court, and notes that the way something is being treated on the show is not exactly true to life, but otherwise think the show fairly accurate, they will have to accept the contradiction and move on.

Lastly, there are those that can interpret what is meant, but whose global beliefs run contrary. They understand what is being connotated, but their own ideology rejects it. Someone with an alternate experience of the law, and the perceptions expressed on the show will reformat what the show gives them to place it in a new context. This would be an ‘oppositional’ or ‘counter-hegemonic’ reading.

In the strange event that someone – perhaps from another culture – understood the intended meaning though a different series of codes than the producers used, this would then be an ‘aberrant decoding’.

The dominant order, then, runs more contrary to the specifics or reality, and the oppositional might be supposed to be too obscure for most to be aware of. It might then be supposed that the ‘negotional’ code is how most read, and that in disseminating its material, Law and Order continues to uphold the current hegemonic preferences, without worrying about them too strictly, as producers must be aware of audience interpretation.