3 Encoding Modern Family: Decoding Traditional Family

In every episode of CBS’ Undercover Boss, the same story repeats itself. The show aims to show hard work to viewers and the leaders of companies. Someone from the “c-suite” (the chief offices: chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, etc.) of a large corporation goes “undercover” to see what it is like to work in their own company. Producers of the show tell employees they are taping for something else, and they are given a person (the boss) to show how to work the job—for some reason the workers appear not to know what is happening even in the 11^th season. While the show aims to disclose what it is like to work for companies in America, the show ultimately celebrates the supposed greatness of American capitalism—there is even a clause in the contract that bans producers from making companies look bad.

A major problem is the viewer does not see actual work. Each scenario is made for TV. They find a job where the boss will perform ineptly for comedic effect. Producers always pick employees who have a dramatic story that will create empathy with viewers. Then at the end, the boss gives the employees who they worked with something to show they care. Either they institute a company scholarship, and the worker is the first recipient, or they offer to pay the worker’s medical bill, or some other social issue that demonstrates the humanity of these bosses. In some instances, they reprimand or fire negligent employees. But the boss never recognizes the problems are systemic. For instance, instead of giving all employees better healthcare, they help the person they interacted with to make themselves feel better.

Undercover Boss feeds on alienation, much the same way as capitalism more generally. Alienation is the process through which people become separated from other people and the material world.^[1] Under capitalism, workers become alienated in four ways. First, workers rarely see the end product of their labor (or the consumers). Second, workers are alienated from the process of their labor. For example, an auto worker rarely sees the construction of a car from beginning to end—they see the part they work on but have no idea how to build a car. Third, workers become alienated from other people—both other workers and consumers. Finally, they become alienated from themselves. Alienation has the effect of mystifying the production process. Ultimately consumers (and economists) engage in commodity fetishism because they begin to believe commodities magically arrive in the market.^[2]

Importantly, we also don’t see the labor to produce Undercover Boss. Even though the show has no actors, and it is “unscripted,” each episode requires the work of dozens of employees from hairstylists to production assistants. The camera hides all these workers, so that everything behind the camera is concealed. Television shows are commodities and follow the same logic of any other commodity, including being made by workers. Hence, alienation is a key component of producing popular culture.

While we watch the supposed de-alienation of workers at large corporations on Undercover Boss, the show itself produces alienation for the show’s workers. Media companies are large conglomerates who utilize labor to produce cultural goods. Obscured from the show are the art worlds^[3]­­—networks of people create popular culture and impact the production of the show—that make the show possible.

In the end, what we see on Undercover Boss is ideology—an upside-down vision of reality. In this chapter, I discuss the way ideology works through representations in popular culture.

Representation

The importance of popular culture lies in the way it represents ideas. Representation is how we use signs to think, speak, and feel. When we use words, signs, and symbols to represent something else, we give them meanings. To “represent” means for one thing to stand in the place of something else. In representative democracy, we vote for someone to stand in our place for governmental affairs. For representation in culture, we imbue meaning to symbols through language. The tricky part of representation is that what might mean one thing to me might mean something entirely different to you. Neither of our interpretations are right or wrong, but we must be aware of and be respectful to those differences in meanings.

There are three approaches scholars generally take to representations in culture: the reflective approach, the intentional approach, and the constructionist approach. In this book, I take the constructionist approach, but it is important to understand all three approaches.

The oldest approach to representation is the reflective approach. According to the reflective approach meaning lies in the object itself and the language we use “reflects” the true meaning of the object. It derives from the ancient Greek concept mimesis, which emphasizes how language and art imitate nature. From a reflective approach, Figure 1 is a cow. There is something innate in this cow that makes it a cow. The problem is different languages have different terms for cow and Figure 1 is hardly a cow, it is a picture of a cow (or better yet, a picture of what we call a cow). News is supposed to be a reflective representation of reality. But even news does not provide a reflection because it is filtered through media.^[4] If we believed the local television news was reflective of reality, we would think the only things that happen in our regions are violent crime, sports, and people saving ducklings.

The second approach to representation is the intentional approach. Taking an intentional approach to representation means the individual can put intention into the use of signs. An intentional approach posits that people can put meaning in signs as if the speaker/sign-user can change how pother people use a sign. A great example of this is the movie Pootie Tang where the main character (Pootie Tang) makes up random words and everyone understands him. Advertising aims to give meaning to everyone who consumes an advertisement. However, there are always unintended interpretations of signs. For instance, Coca-Cola had a campaign “Open a Coke, Open happiness” where they hoped people would connect drinking a Coke with being happy. But it could also be the case that your grandmother hit by a Coca-Cola truck, or your partner broke up with you visiting the Coca-Cola Factory in Atlanta. In both cases, Coke would bring immense sadness. Small groups of people may be active in their intentional use of terms, but it is difficult to apply outward.

More frequently, someone comes up with a new phrase and it catches on based on no intention of the original user. For instance, the phrase “on fleek” was first used by 16-year-old Kayla Lewis when she made a Vine video to show off her eyebrows in 2014. It became a viral hit with corporate brands using it and now eyebrow salons with on fleek in their names. But Lewis never intended for this to happen. Rather what we see is a social constructionist approach to representation. From a social constructionist approach “Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems – concepts and signs.”^[5] When different people consume different media content, they take away different meanings. This is a product of representation and culture. For different people, different representations hold different meanings. Social actors, like Lewis, create the conceptual systems, but they do not have control over how it works.

In this book, I utilize a social constructionist approach. People are at the center of the meaning making process, but they do not control representations. Since culture is a process, we cannot control meanings associated with signs. Everything depends on the historical, geographical, social, and political context that situates every individual’s understanding of a sign. People are at the center of meaning production and consumption, but individuals have little-to-no control over those meanings.

From Propaganda to Ideology

Many people are concerned with propaganda, the intentional distortion of facts to persuade people. Propaganda is a problem that often allows bad government actors or wealthy people to influence society. When it saturates our news media, propaganda presents problems with how we understand reality.^[6] But a hidden problem lies in the information we consume that shapes the way we see the world without intentionally doing so.

From a very early age, Americans are taught (especially in schools) that they need to work at a job to earn money to survive. While other ways of surviving exist (hunting and gathering, farming, communal living, etc.), the idea of working 8-hour workdays or 40-hour work weeks are taught as the standard, if not the reality for all. We believe this to be the truth. This is buttressed by the fact we need money to buy water, food, shelter, and clothing to survive and the primary way to acquire money is to work. We absorb these ideas through ideology.

Rather than propaganda, we need to understand ideology as a source of how we understand the world through media. Ideology is an upside-down vision of the world. Ideology is the “ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”^[7] It obscures the real relations of production by making workers think that they control the conditions in which they live.^[8] People with money and power have the ability to distort these ideas by controlling the sources of information and paying people to produce their ideas for mass consumption. Marx states:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

In other words, people with money, resources, and time produce the ideas of society. As opposed to propaganda, ideology allows us to do the work for the powerful.

Ideology created by the wealthy and powerful works to change the world to their benefit. I term this ideology as action.^[9] It is the conscious effort to provide information to people that runs counter to reality. For example, the Koch Brothers have quietly funded universities with hundreds of millions of dollars. The money goes to centers, institutes, colleges, and law schools to support their conservative libertarian causes. The Mercatus Center at Geroge Mason University (GMU) is the largest recipient of Koch money and their express mission statement states it is “where top classical liberal scholars solve real-world challenges. Grounded in the tradition of market-oriented thinking and classical liberal ideas, we equip high-agency talent to apply bold ideas that shape institutions, inform policy, and help people flourish.” Classes aren’t taught by the Mercatus Center per se, rather they fund scholars to produce the kind of research that changes policy. Therefore, it operates as a think tank near the nation’s capital. As a think tank, Mercatus Center affiliates speak with news outlets about their research and influence policy—a process described as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their landmark book Manufacturing Consent.^[10] The process of ideology as action is hidden but requires the active work of the wealthy and powerful.

We both produce and consume ideology every day without realizing it. This is ideology as inaction—the subconscious enacting of ideology through stasis. For example, the axiom that hard work is rewarded runs counter to everything I know on an intellectual level, but that doesn’t stop me or anyone else from working hard to try to make more money and get ahead in life. By going to work and working hard, I enact ideology through inaction. I don’t wake up and think, “let me show people how hard I work”; rather, it is the quality of going about my everyday business that produces ideology without me even trying to produce it.

Ideology creates hegemony, an all-encompassing power we consent to everyday. We consent because we get something in return. When I wake up and decide to work, I consent to ideology. I get something from this consent: food, clothing, and the status quo. Society requires us to work, we believe it is the only way to exist because we know nothing else. This is ideology at work.

Encoding Decoding

When we watch, listen to, play, read, or observe popular culture, each person interprets culture in different ways. These interpretations are cultural, social, contextual, and ideological. Through our individual positions, we see the world in a myriad of ways, but they all function through hegemony. In other words, we may interpret popular culture differently but those interpretations reinforce hegemony.

Stuart Hall described this process of interpreting media in “Encoding/Decoding”^[11]. Through the process of encoding and decoding messages, media tend to advance the dominant ideology of a moment. Encoding is the meaning put into mediated messages. Everything from genre to the historic moment go into encoding messages by the media creator. Decoding is the meaning taken out of mediated messages. Our place in the social structure influences what we get out of the message. If we were to look at a news broadcast from 1990, we would get a much different meaning out of it than we would have at the time.

We interpret meanings differently because of the level of ambiguity contained within different symbols. This is due to connotation and denotation. Denotation is a strict literal meaning of a symbol. We generally think of denotation as objective. On the other hand, connotation is the associative meanings that attach to a symbol, which we usually think of as subjective. The problem, according to Hall, is that everything has a mixture of both connotative and denotative meanings.

The flexibility between connotation and denotation often produces dissonance for the observer. When someone is confronted with a meaning outside of their understanding of the world, they often think of this as bias. But just like propaganda, the term bias obscures power. Media only seem bias when we think that a word has a strong connotation. However, everything has connotation! We only observe it as “bias” when we understand a different connotation. Hall states “those aspects of a sign which appear to be taken, in any language community at any point in time, as its ‘literal’ meaning (denotation) from the more associative meanings for the sign which it is possible to generate (connotation).”^[12] Things that seem “natural” when meaning lines up with our preconceived notions of the world. But nothing in language is natural – rather, they are naturalized. When something seems natural, ideology is at work. “They produce apparently ‘natural’ recognitions. This has the (ideological) effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present.”^[13] In other words, bias is a product of hegemony as we fail to see ideology at work.

To support hegemony, Hall argues the “dominant cultural order” is the language in which messages tend to get encoded. Note here it is dominant not determined. There is always room for alternative encoding/decoding. Hall says “‘dominant’ because there exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings’; and these both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized.”^[14] We always have the capacity to interpret things in our own way, but the dominant cultural order tends to proliferate.

Hall outlines three positions people take when encoding/decoding media messages. First, the dominant-hegemonic position operates within dominant code. This code is dominant because it is the ideal expression of ideology. Second, the negotiated position operates within the dominant code, but does so by creating exceptions to the rules. In this position, a message may poke at the edges of hegemony, but it still articulates ideology. Finally, the oppositional code decodes the message in complete opposition to the dominant system – Hall states this happens during crises. An oppositional code reverses the dominant logics in society and presents new social formations.

Modern Family – a genre defining sitcom

While the processes of encoding and decoding remain distinct, they never occur independently from each other. As symbols bounce through the circuit of culture, the dominant cultural order tends to have a determining power over the decoded message in the end.^[15]

For example, during the 2012 American presidential election, a journalist asked Ann Romney (GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s wife) her favorite television show. She responded Modern Family—a sitcom that emphasized non-normative familial situations. This struck many observers as odd given Romney’s support for “traditional family values.” Mitt Romney campaigned on the idea that marriage is between a man and a woman, divorce is immoral, and women should be at home raising children, among other conservative Christian beliefs. How could someone dedicated to the “traditional” family enjoy watching Modern Family

In response, one of the show’s creators tweeted “We’ll offer her the role of officiant at Mitch & Cam’s wedding. As soon as it’s legal.”^[16] The punch line is that creators designed Modern Family to critique the so-called “traditional” values that Romney espouses. However, the dominant reading of Modern Family allows people to believe that these non-normative values are funny, not serious. As a result, the creators of Modern Family actually reinforce conceptions of a “traditional” family. Of course, the message can be decoded differently; for instance, to normalize same-sex relationships as well as intergenerational and cross-cultural unions. Cultural texts, no matter how transgressive, operate within a dominant cultural context, while never losing the potential to challenge and transgress dominant cultural values – after all same-sex marriage is now legal. The dominant cultural context informs every part of the circuit of culture, and we’re just along for the ride.

Conclusion

Consciously or not, popular culture producers and consumers reinforce the dominant ideas in society. Creators of Undercover Boss thought they had a formula to show the ineptitude of corporate bosses, but there was no way to show an accurate portrayal of labor in capitalism on television. Through the show’s production, the dominant-hegemonic position gets encoded by producers and decoded by most consumers. The writers feel their negotiated position creates cracks in the hegemony, but the bosses are given the last word of redemption on every episode. Meanwhile, my oppositional reading of the way the show produces alienation is not the dominant reading. Most viewers watch the show for the feel-good moments at the end where the CEO offers an employee a scholarship or healthcare. As a result, Undercover Boss reproduces ideology through the dominant-hegemonic codes of society.

Bibliography

Arditi, David. Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44587-4.

Becker, Howard Saul. Art Worlds. 1st ed. University of California Press, 1984.

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, vol. 3rd. Routledge, 2007. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0906/2009286081.html.

Hall, Stuart, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon, eds. Representation. 2nd ed. Sage: The Open University, 2013.

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 2002.

Marx, Karl. “Capital: Volume One.” In Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan, vol. 2nd. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, vol. 2d. Norton, 1978.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert C. Tucker. Norton, 1978.

Moaba, Alex. “Ann Romney Likes ‘Modern Family,’ But Show’s Creator Pushes Back.” TV & Film. HuffPost, August 28, 2012. Online Edition. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/modern-family-ann-romney_n_1837171.