1. Week 2 – What’s wrong with the
media?
Gangnam Style

2. What do you think the meaning of the
text is?
A) Parody
B) Just for laughs song
C) Money-making scheme
D) Serious cultural expression
Why do you think that is?

3. Context of Gangnam Style
• Who, where, what?
• Gangnam Style (강남 스타일) – dance pop
song released by South Korean Park Jae Sung
(PSY) in July 2012, title single of his sixth
studio album (knowyourmeme.com, 2012)

4. Context of Gangnam Style
• From your research, could you give me a simple
definition of the term ‘Gangnam Style’?
• "Gangnam Style" is a Korean neologism mainly
associated with upscale fashion and lavish
lifestyle associated with trendsetters in Seoul’s
Gangnam district (강남), which is considered the
most affluent part of the metropolitan area. In
colloquial usage, it is comparable to the English
slang terms “swag” or “yolo”.
(urbandictionary.com, 2012)

5. Context of Gangnam Style
• English Translation:
Oppan Gangnam style
Gangnam style
A girl who is warm and graceful during the day
A classy girl who knows how to enjoy a cup of coffee
A girl whose heart gets hotter when night comes
A girl with that kind of twist
I’m a guy
A guy who is as warm as you during the day
A guy who downs his coffee before it cools down
A guy whose heart bursts when night comes
That kind of guy
Beautiful, loveable
Yes you, hey, yes you, hey
Beautiful, loveable
Yes you, hey, yes you, hey
Now let’s go until the end

6. Context of Gangnam Style
• What do the lyrics suggest to you?
• How might they be related to this ‘Gangnam
Style’?
• Do they have any relation to the fact that the
video has gone viral?

7. Context of Gangnam Style
• As U.S.-based Korean blogger Jae Kim recently
explained on her site, My Dear Korea, "In Korea,
there's a joke poking fun at women who eat
2,000-won (about $2) ramen for lunch and then
spend 6,000 won on Starbucks coffee. They're
called Doenjangnyeo, or soybean paste women,
for their propensity to crimp on essentials so they
can overspend on conspicuous luxuries, of which
coffee is, believe it or not, one of the most
common." (Jae Kim quoted in mercurynews.com,
2012)

8. Context of Gangnam Style
• Are there any visual elements that make the
video stand out?
• Has anyone noticed the locations?
• How are they presented in the video?
• What might this suggest?

9. What did you think the text was?
• Parody? Just for laughs? Money-making
scheme? Serious cultural expression?

10. Stuart Hall
• Stuart Hall (1932 -) is an important British cultural
theorist and sociologist of Marxist influence. He is
considered to be one of the founders of the
British Cultural Studies school of thought. He was
a figure of utmost importance within the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham
University.
• Some of Hall’s key ideas revolve around
representation, cultural identity, hegemony and
power, audience and institutions.

11. The Encoding/Decoding Model
• The ‘Encoding/Decoding’ Model within Mass-
Media communication proposed by Hall
highlighted the importance of an active audience.
The phases of this model of communication are
labelled as moments (The moment of the
encoding, of the text and of the decoding). What
is pioneering about this model of communication
is the proposition that audiences are active and
diverse and they will not necessarily read a text in
the same way, although they might be able to
recognise the intended meaning.

12. The Encoding/Decoding Model
• Thus, the process of communication in this case will
have three main outcomes:
• Dominant (Hegemonic) reading – where the reader of
a text accepts and reproduces its intended meaning
• Negotiated reading – where the reader accepts the
intended meaning in broad strokes, but might resist
some of its elements by modifying them to fit their
own contexts
• Oppositional (Counter-hegemonic) reading – where the
reader understands the dominant reading but they are
socially opposed to it, therefore rejecting it and
framing it in a different manner

13. The Encoding/Decoding Model

14. The Encoding/Decoding Model
• What seems to be the intended message of this text
and how might this affect your reading of it?
• Does it conflict or reinforce your own position?
• Do you find it difficult to relate to it because it is South
Korean?
• Do you find the message universal enough for it to be
relevant worldwide?
• Do you think this message might have had any effect
on the way it spread virally?
• How do you think people from different backgrounds
might have read it in different ways?

15. The ‘success’ of Gangnam Style in a
highly digitalised culture
• Have you noticed that Youtube plays an advert
before letting you watch Gangnam Style?
• What other findings have you come up with
concerning its spread and popularity?

16. The ‘success’ of Gangnam Style in a
highly digitalised culture
• The video became ‘viral’ within days of its release. It had coverage from
local K-Pop websites and regional Asian websites and radio stations. It
went further to be mentioned on international websites and then it was
picked up by international news corporations such as CNN.
• The number of views this video had yesterday (October 11) on Youtube is
over 427,263,881 (Youtube.com, 2012). It has a considerable number of
spin-offs and parodies made around the world, including one made by PSY
himself.
• The video was mentioned on social networks by a number of world-
renown artists such as Nelly Furtado, Britney Spears, Katy Perry and Justin
Bieber, leading to collaborations with some of these, an American debut
and a number of tours and concerts in South Korea and elsewhere.

17. The ‘success’ of Gangnam Style in a
highly digitalised culture
• Not only was it picked up by big names in entertainment, like The
Today Show, Saturday Night Live, The Dodgers Show and The Ellen
Degeneres Show, but it received considerable attention from
international financial media and the academia: CNN, The wall
Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Policy and The Harvard
Business Review have all mentioned Gangnam Style
(knowyourmeme.com, 2012).
• The video has received national and international awards and is
currently topping billboard charts around the world, having
managed to break into the British and American market. Some of
you might have heard it being played in clubs.
• As a result, Gangnam Style was featured in Samsung
advertisements (time.com, 2012) and has gone on to be very
successful financially, although no numbers have been officially
published.

18. The ‘success’ of Gangnam Style in a
highly digitalised culture
• How do you think the viral and commercial
success of this video might have an effect on
the message it sends out?
• If this is a parody of the ‘overnight rich’ of
Seoul which might have turned PSY himself
into an ‘overnight rich’, does that make it less
credible or not?
• Do you think this was intended as a money-
making scheme or was it just ‘pure luck’?

19. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
• Adorno (1903-1969) and Horkheimer (1985-
1973) were central members of the Frankfurt
School of critical theory. Exiled from Nazi
Germany, their thinking was influenced by Karl
Marx’s materialism and the idealism of Hegel.
The Frankfurt School are the founders of
Critical Theory as a school of thought.

20. The Culture Industry – Enlightment as
Mass Deception
• In ‘The Culture Industry – Enlightment as
Mass Deception’, Adorno and Horkheimer
critique culture as a mass-producing, supply-
driven industry which functions inside the
capitalist system. Within it, the audiences
consume culture passively, just as mass-
produced objects, which are passed onto
them in a vertically integrated system, by
powerful institutions.

21. The Culture Industry – Enlightment as
Mass Deception
• ‘The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on
the electrical industry, or the motion picture industry on the banks,
is characteristic of the whole sphere , whose individual branches
are themselves economically interwoven.
[...]
Pure amusement [...] is interrupted by a surrogate overall meaning
which the culture industry insists on giving to its products, and yet
misuses as a mere pretext for bringing in the stars.
[...]
The deception is not that the culture industry supplies amusement
but that it ruins the fun by allowing business considerations to
involve it in the ideological processes of a culture in the process of
self-liquidation’
(Adorno and Horkheimer quoted in During, 1993:32, 40, 41)

22. The Culture Industry – Enlightment as
Mass Deception
• Can you name any commercial elements in the video? Can
you name any elements that may have been ‘borrowed’
from other successful music video formulas?
• How about the music itself? Is it original in any way? Does it
belong to a well-known genre? How could you explain that
Gangnam Style, despite being in Korean (which is not
widely spoken in the UK or USA) is played in clubs and
people enjoy dancing to it?
• How about the guest star appearances (3 members of K-
Pop Bands, a Korea’s Got Talent contestant and 2
comedians and TV personalities)? What do you think their
roles are? How do you think all these elements relate to
Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of culture as an industry?

23. Conclusion
• Why do you think this should interest you in
any way?

24. Conclusion
• How to apply this information to your 181MC
essay: You need to understand why you are
choosing a certain topic and what you want to
discover and/or demonstrate in relation to it.
Having a goal, an aim for your assignment will
help you enormously. You will get a much
better mark if you understand where you are
going with it and what you want from it.

25. Further reading
• Further reading: Semiotics for Beginners – Stuart
Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model
http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem
08c.html
• Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer – The Culture
Industry: Enlightment as Mass Deception
http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/PoMoSemina
r/Readings/AdornoHork.pdf