Decoding Mass Media/Encoding Conspiracy Theory

Contemporary conspiracy theories are generally formulated about modern institutions such as the state, science, industries, capitalism and the ‘power elite’. Mass media play a particular role in this: From established newspapers to film, documentaries or news – mass media invoke distrust since they are powerful, omnipresent and highly influential in what we think, see and experience. From the perspective of media studies and communication sciences, it will be demonstrated that conspiracy theorists are, essentially, (inter)active audiences involved in the decoding of mass media texts to, simultaneously, produce their theories. The chapter utilizes an illustrative case study of YouTubers decoding Illuminati signs and symbols in media texts and public performances of celebrities. The key assumption in audience research as proposed by Stuart Hall is then that there is no inherent meaning in a media text since consumers read, decode, reconstruct and, ultimately, produce meaning in different ways.