Encoding and Decoding Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Stuart Hall employed the terms ”encoding” and ”decoding” in an influential article first drafted in 1973 as a stenciled paper published by the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. CCCS, of which Hall was director from 1968 to 1979, was committed to developing new methods and models for the study of culture. Hall’s rethinking of communication and mass media studies contributed enormously to a reformulation of the study of popular culture. Unlike those conventional mass media studies that view communication as a unidirectional circuit comprised of sender-message-receiver, Hall suggests that communication is an ongoing and ultimately unstable process marked by feedback, struggle, exchange, and negotiation. Importantly, in his encoding/decoding paper, he insists that the content of mass media must not be viewed as input that gives rise to predetermined effects. Instead, Hall invokes the language and logic of semiotics, focusing less on the presumed effectiveness of a particular instance of media communication and emphasizing the discursive production – by way of cultural codes – of the ”media sign.” No matter how transparent or natural the meaning of a media sign might seem, its intelligibility is always secured through the deployment of conventional (or hegemonic) codes.

Hall points out that successful communication doesn’t come naturally; it depends upon the effective use of discursive codes to compel a meaningful decoding activity. Communication, on Hall’s view, is an active process that requires work on the part of both producers (described as encoders) and viewers (described as decoders). On Hall’s view, mass media messages are both carefully structured through the use of conventional codes and fundamentally polysemic, that is, open to a variety of readings.

The most analytically productive component of Hall’s application of semiotic models to thinking about mass media is to be found in his careful discussion of three possible decoding positions. Meaningful media signs – signs that make sense -are those in which there is some measure of symmetry between the processes of encoding and decoding. The most symmetrical is the dominant-hegemonic position. Here, the viewer interprets the media sign according to the same logic used by encoder-producers. Often described as a ”preferred reading,” in this framework, the viewer’s decoding strategies proceed along the same logic as the producers’ encoding strategies. Without conflict, the meaning of the sign is secured hegemonically. By contrast, the least symmetrical decoding position is described as oppositional. Here, the viewer recognizes the preferred reading that has been constructed by producers, but rejects it in its totality. If in the dominant-hegemonic mode, signs are accepted and viewed as natural, in the oppositional mode, signs and the codes that produce them are viewed as misleading distortions of reality. More common than either the dominant-hegemonic or oppositional decoding position is the negotiated position, in which a viewer accepts portions of the preferred reading of the media sign while rejecting others.

The impact of Hall’s short paper on the field of cultural studies cannot be underestimated. The invocation of semiotic models had a lasting impact upon the practice of cultural studies in Britain and North America. Hall endorsed a shift in this field towards a theoretically sophisticated form of audience studies, which was taken up most notably by David Morley (1980) in his analyses of Nationwide and by Janice Radway (1984) in Reading the Romance. Although it remains a significant model in the field of cultural studies, Hall’s encoding/decoding has been displaced by poststructuralist approaches to making sense of communication.

Bibliography:

Hall, S. (1973) Encoding and decoding in the media discourse. CCCS Stencilled Paper 7.
Hall, S. (1980) Encoding/decoding. In: Hobson, D., Lowe, , & Willis, P. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language. Hutchinson, London.