Representation Videos

**I got my supplemental readings mixed up and somehow failed to write a blog about the supplemental videos about representation the week we were supposed to, so I am doing so now.**

In Stuart Hall's video "Representation & the Media," he discusses the origin of the verb To Represent. He suggests that the very nature of the word implies that something is being re-presented, as if something already existed before and is now being restyled in some way. Though this is a very interesting way to look at it, it is the very definition he is trying to subvert. The definition he continues with is that representation means that something "stands in" for something else--which is the way I have always looked at representation. To me, representation has always been about symbolism. A painting can represent something; Picasso's blue paintings can represent sadness; the color stands in for the emotion rather than scrawling "this is what sadness looks like" on the canvas.

Hall later clarifies that representation is, "the way in which meaning is given to the things depicted." He also states that the gap of representation is the difference between the "true meaning" of something and the "media representation" of that thing. I found this video very helpful in understanding encoding and decoding especially. It is helpful to deconstruct a word like "representation" and discover what it truly means. In a way, this video is a representation of the word representation--Hall takes the common sense definition of the word and finds that other meanings can be represented within it. I wonder if he was aware of this work that he was doing, and I am surprised he didn't mention it.