Media Synthesis Essay

The media used in this assignment consists of an ad campaign by Mazda for their 3-series car. The ad campaign is made up of similar posters portraying the 3-series car from different feature perspectives. In the slightly different posters the car is adorned in red paint, contrasted with a desolate, gray-black background and a white information banner on the bottom third. It features the car positioned to showcase its grill and aggressive, reptilian, headlight display and is iridescently shaded in areas throughout the car’s surface. In addition the “Zoom Zoom” (WP Group, 2013) slogan appears in the top right corner of each ad and the “Driving Matters” (WP Group, 2013) slogan appears in the bottom left corner. Unlike other Mazda ads, this series

There is the dominant hegemonic reading, which entails the reader decoding the message as it was intended, thereby reproducing the meaning of the message with a subscription to the cultural biases embedded within. Next, there is the oppositional reading that positions the reader as understanding the media’s coding, but due to their social location placing them appositionally to dominant biases, rejects the code. Lastly, there is the negotiated reading, which positions the reader as understanding the code and its biases and selectively accepting and rejecting components within the code based on their own experiences and politic. (Hall, 1973) Using this perspective, affords an understanding of how hegemony is employed when decoding and analyzing the Mazda

In this way the viewer is enticed to believe that the product will elevate their status in a hegemonic structure that succeeds in lording over and sublimating them. In this way, the informed consent of the viewer is gained through a reward system that then renders invisible the ideological attachments to this subscription. These attachments include a subscription to the institutional patriarchy, colonialist ideologies and practices that incorporate the biases issued from these