Encoding and Decoding

The ‘Encoding/Decoding’ model was originally proposed by Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall in 1973. Hall was a founding member of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. A school that has been a key instrument in the development of cultural studies.

The Encoding/Decoding model can arguably fall under the broad topic of Semiotics.

At the time of publication, the Encoding/Decoding model of communication (1973) was part of a paradigm shift in media and cultural studies that would move society away from an effects model. Although in today's society, the premise of the article differs slightly - viewers simply decode information in imperfect alignment with its encoding by the producers.

Fig 1. The Encoding/Decoding Model of Communication

Hall's Model of Communication proposed three different viewer positions:

• Hegemonic/Dominant,
• Negotiated,
• and Oppositional.

Encoding and Decoding is the way that media messages are produced, dispersed and consumed. Hall's argument emphasises that the meaning is not fixed or determined by the sender or producer - the message is never transparent, although some viewers may receive it as so (depending on their personal circumstances, education, lifestyle, interests or experiences). The audience is never a passive recipient. 

Dominant/Hegemonic Reading

'The dominant definitions, however, are hegemonic precisely because they represent definitions of situations and events which are 'in dominance', (global). Dominant definitions connect events, implicitly or explicitly, to grand totalizations, to the great syntagmatic views-of-the-world: they take 'large views' of issues: they relate events to the 'national interest' or to the level of geo-politics, even if they make these connections in truncated, inverted or mystified ways' (Hall, 1973)

The dominant reading is where the reader fully accepts the preferred and posed reading. They will read the text in the way that the producer intended them to.

Negotiated Reading 

Decoding within the negotiated reading contains a mixture of adaptive (hegemonic) and oppositional elements. As a negotiated reader, you acknowledge the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions but as well as this, on a more reserved level, negotiated readers also disagree with some of these ideologies and form their own opinion through agreeing and disagreeing with the viewpoints given. It is a partial belief and acceptance of the reading but adapts it in a way that would reflect the reader's own position, interests and experiences.

Oppositional Reading

An oppositional reading of a media text would imply that the viewer completely disagrees with. It is a complete rejection of the reading. This may occur due to social position, interests or experiences.

It is interesting to note that Hall 'referred to various phases in the Encoding/Decoding mode of communication as 'moments' (Chandler, 2014):

• The moment of encoding: 'the institutional practices and organisational conditions and practices of production' (Corner 1983, p. 266); 
• Secondly, you have the moment of the text: 'the [...] symbolic construction, arrangement and perhaps performance. [...] The form and content of what is published or broadcast' (Corner, 1983, p. 267); 
• Lastly, the moment of decoding: 'the moment of reception [or] consumption [...] by [...] the reader/hearer/viewer' which is regarded by most theorists as 'closer to a form of "construction"' than to 'the passivity [...] suggested by the term "reception"' (Corner, 1983, p. 267)

Hall refers to several 'linked but distinctive moments - production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction' (Hall, 1980) as a part of the circuit or model of communication.

Bibliography

• Chandler, D. Aberystwyth University, (2014). Semiotics for Beginners. [image] Available at: http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/sem02.html [Accessed 7 Mar. 2017]
• Corner, John (1983): 'Textuality, Communication and Power'. In Davis & Walton (Eds.), pp. 266-81
• Hall, Stuart ([1973] 1980): 'Encoding/decoding'. In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Ed.): Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 London: Hutchinson, pp. 128-38
• Hall, Stuart. 1973. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham, England: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 507–17.