Encoding/decoding

From Driscollwiki

Hall, S. (1980) "Encoding/decoding." Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979 (pp. 128-295). London: Hutchinson.

Traditional mass comm research imagined a linear "circuit" or "loop"

• Instead, we can think of a structure of "linked but distinctive moments" (128)
  • "production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction"
• "No one moment can fully guarantee the next" (129)
• The 'object' of these practices are "meanings and messages", "sign-vehicles" (128)

Contents 1 "Moments" of this process 2 Construction of codes 3 "Preferred" meanings 4 Other meanings 5 Three reading positions 5.1 Dominant-hegemonic position (136) 5.2 Negotiated position (137) 5.3 Oppositional position (138)

"Moments" of this process

Production

• Construction of a message by industrial actors
• Determining its "message form" (129)
• The "labour process" in the discursive mode
• Encoding

Reception, consumption

• Not identical nor parallel to production
• Audience-centered
• Before a message can have an "effect", "satisfy a "need", or be "put to a "use"", it must be decoded and "appropriated as meaningful discourse" (130)
• It is then these decoded messages that may have effects, uses, or needs

"The codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical. The degrees of symmetry - that is, the degrees of 'understanding' and 'misunderstanding' in the communicative exchange - depend on the degrees of symmetry/asymmetry (relations of equivalence) established between the positions of the 'personifications', encoder-producer and decoder-receiver." (131)

• "Distortions" or "misunderstandings" arise from the lack of equivalence
  • Not simply a failure on the part of the producer-encoder (131)

Construction of codes

• "There is no zero degree in language", nothing "natural" about it (132)
• Some codes are so widely distributed and learned at such an early age that they "appear not to be constructed" (132)
  • But even "apparently 'natural' visual codes are culture-specific" (132)
• Re: Eco

Language is also a site of class structure

• Contested meanings
• Barthes, signifiers "are [...] the fragments of ideology" (as quoted on 134)

"Preferred" meanings

"Dominant culture order" (134)

• Attempts to impose its connotations, though they are not "univocal", nor "uncontested"
• Social order embedded in these "preferred meanings"
• "Performative rules" of discourse "seek actively" to "enforce or pre-fer" certain "semantic domains" (134)

The circulation and enforcing of "dominant" or "preferred meanings"

• Is hard work! (135)
• Not uncontested, not self-evident

Other meanings

"Systematically distorted communication" in television

• Consistent 'failure' of preferred meanings to be read as intended (135)

Explained first (and erroneously) by "selective perception theory" (135)

• "significant clustering" of non-preferred readings indicates that it is not merely a private, individual phenomenon

Three reading positions

Dominant-hegemonic position (136)

Viewer reads the message as intended by its producer

• "Viewer is operating inside the dominant code" (136)
• Professional code is a sub-set that have been encoded a 2nd time to the broadcast industry's professional norms

Hegemonic position (137)

• Definies within its terms the mental horizon, universe, of possible meanings, of a whole sector of relations in a society or culture
• Carries with it the stamp of legitimacy - coterminus with what is "natural", "inevitable", "taken for granted" about the social order

Negotiated position (137)

Recognizes and engages actively with the hegemonic

• Viewer recognizes the "dominantly defined, professional signified" (137) as generalizable but reserves the ability not to localize
• Responds with a mixture of "adaptive" and "oppositional" elements
  • Makes some local or "corporate" "ground rules" or "exceptions" to the hegemonic
• "Shot through with contradiction" (137)

Oppositional position (138)

Recognizes the hegemonic-dominant position

• But refuses to either localize OR globalize
• "Detotalizes" the message
• "Retotalizes" within "some alternate framework of reference" (138)

Important political moment:

• When the "negotiated" slips into an "oppositional" position