Encoding+and+Decoding

=** Encoding and Decoding, Stuart Hall **=

Stuart Hall was a Jamaican born in 1932 and died in 2014. He is considered one of the founding fathers of The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and his research focused on cultural studies and sociology, specifically issues related to hegemony, politics, and media. He developed the encoding/decoding model in 1980, which explained that audiences are active recipients of media messages. Hall draws on Marxism to explain the process of encoding and decoding as "it highlights the specificity of the forms in which the product of the process 'appears' in each moment, and thus what distinguishes discursive 'production' from other types of production in our society and in modern media systems" (Hall, 1980, p. 128). There is also influence from Barthe within Hall's paper, especially in terns of Barthe’s ideas on denotation and connotation. Denotation is used to “naturalize” language, whereas c onnotation is the ideological system of language.

Before we can get into the encoding/decoding model, we first need to understand the four stage model of communication. Hall developed this model because he believed the sender/message/receiver model oversimplified the communication process. "It is also possible (and useful) to think of this process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments - production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction" (Hall,1980, p. 128). The p roduction, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction model delves deeper into the communication process and allowed Hall to build his encoding and decoding model.

Hall's Encoding/Decoding Model sets out to explain how m ass media produces encoded messages and audiences decode them through three different hypothetical positions. The media assigns meanings, which are based on frameworks of knowledge, relations of production and technical infrastructure to the messages being broadcasted to the audience. They then send these encoded messages out as “meaningful” discourse. From there the audience decodes the messages based on frameworks of knowledge, relations of production and technical infrastructure. “In a 'determinate' moment the structure employs a code and yields a 'message': at another determinate moment the message, via its decoding, issues into the structure of social practices" (Hall, 1980, p. 130).

Hall's three hypothetical positions audiences can take after decoding messages are dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional. The dominant-hegemonic position is willing to accept and reproduce the dominant message produced by the media. "When the viewer takes the connoted meaning from, say, a television newscast or current affairs programme full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded" (Hall, 1980, p. 136). Within the dominant-hegemonic position are p rofessional codes which "serves to reproduce the dominant definitions" (Hall, 1980, p. 136). In the negotiated position, the viewer acknowledges the hegemonic message, however she/he does not completely accept the message. "It acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules - it operates with exceptions to the rule" (Hall, 1980, p. 137). Finally, there is the oppositional position, where the viewer understands the dominant message being encoded, but decodes the message differently based on identity, culture, knowledge, etc. The oppositional position ultimately rejects the dominant message. “Finally, it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and the connotative inflection given by a discourse but to decode the message in a globally contrary way. He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference" (Hall, 1980, p. 137-138).

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