An Overview of Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding Model in Media Contexts

This essay delves into Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding model, a foundational theory in media studies, examining how media messages are created, transmitted, and interpreted by audiences. The essay begins by tracing the historical context of the model, drawing from Shannon and Weaver's work on communication as a technological process, and the subsequent development of semiotic approaches. It then outlines the core components of Hall's model, including encoding, decoding, and the various ways audiences engage with media texts: the dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings. The essay provides examples from popular culture, such as the television show "Family Guy," to illustrate these different modes of interpretation. Furthermore, the essay discusses the significance of Hall's model in the context of contemporary media, highlighting the influence of media sources on societal perceptions and the importance of critical media literacy. It touches upon issues of media manipulation, the rise of the internet, and the changing roles of consumers. The essay also acknowledges limitations of the model and the need for further research in understanding the complex interplay between media, culture, and audience reception, and the influence of factors like class and economic structures on the production and interpretation of media messages.

Essay

Table of Contents
Stuart halls’ encoding decoding model of media links....................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

Stuart halls’ encoding decoding model of media links
In 1949, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) was
published by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, a volume which quickly became an
obligatory reference point for scholars working in the emerging field of knowledge studies.
Strongly advised by Shannon's wartime work on cryptography at Bell Laboratories, the
American Telegraph and Telecommunications (AT&T) research division, which was at the time
the monopoly supplier of telephone services in the United States, the work treated
communication mainly as an engineering challenge where the priority was to optimise the
efficiency with which data moved through transmission. When the spoken or written "messages"
people wished to transmit were turned into signals that could travel through the machine, the
analysts saw issues emerging when these signals were translated back into voice or text at the
other end. Driven by the dependency of the telegraph on Samuel Morse's scheme of dots, dashes,
and pauses. This' information engineering philosophy' concentrated exclusively on the
technological problems of transmission and sharing, as Weaver (1949, p. 27) observed, and had
little to say about creating and taking meaning. "Therefore as he admitted, "the principle of
knowledge established at first in this theory seems disappointing." But, he added, it was only
ever intended in analysis as a first stage and had, he claimed, "cleared the air so penetratingly
that one is now, possibly for the first time, ready for a real theory of meaning (p. 27). Weaver
had a keen interest in sense problems himself, having written a seminal paper on the possibility
of using computing's new technologies to simplify translation from one language to another. But
the "encoding/decoding" metaphor was left to researchers in Europe to follow up in thorough
analyses of how media texts arrange context and how viewers respond and perceive them. A
study group headed by Umberto Eco, Italy's leading proponent of a semiotic approach to media,
delivered a paper at the University of Perugia in the autumn of 1965 outlining an ambitious
semiotic research initiative on the organisation and reception of television shows. Their approach
focused on the notion of "codes," which functioned as primary "communicative conventions"
structures that merged specific signs (words, images, objects) with specific meanings and offered
a possible basis for secondary codes or "subcodes" that "give elements contained in the basic
code a different connotation".

As Eco later recalled, he had seen the lack of fit" between the readings of producers and those of
audiences in his initial 1965 formulation in Perugia as instances of "aberrant" decoding, in the
sense that they were deviations from the sender's intentions; the phrase suggested that audiences
struggled to grasp the message because they dealt with "imperfect or obsolete codes" (Eco, 1974,
p. 54). But seven years later, he had altered his stance in a postscript to the reprint of the original
paper that appeared in the Working Papers in Cultural Studies of the Birmingham Centre,
suggesting that
"The gap between the message transmitted and received" was also a "semiotic guerrilla warfare
space" where alternate interpretations could dispute received and dominant interpretations.
Several years ago, this argument was made in an essay on photography by one of Europe's other
leading exponents of semiotics, Roland Barthes, where he observed that even the apparently. The
audience takes and experiences the message in an analysis and conversion process, where the
coded material is decoded and interpreted into a comprehensible form, while the message is in
the hands of the recipient. This approach gives the recipient the ability to recreate the concept by
assigning interpretations to symbols and understanding the message as a whole. However the
recipient of the message from the senders would not always get the desired response that the
maker expected. In reality, a recipient can decipher a message in three ways, such as dominated,
negotiated and oppositional. The first form of decoding is the dominated response. The audience
or recipient completely embraces and reproduces the code to the creator or sender in this kind of
response. In the animated TV show "Family Guy," for instance, Peter Griffin is frequently seen
committing amazing acts of destruction for his friends, family, and even himself. As a TV show
audience, the expected response is dominated by the fact that it has to be done in effective
manner. The mediated answer is the second form of decoding. This kind of approach partially
believes in the code and embraces the message in general, but often the recipient modifies the
message that best represents their own experiences, desires and roles. For one, Peter and the rest
of the familiar characters make jokes about faith and religious values in several Family Guy
episodes. Most jokes are about Jesus or God, which can harm the credibility of the shows and
can modify the reactions of certain audiences to the programme. The show is designed to
generate comedic content where the viewers will exercise the producer's intended laughing
reaction, but they would have a slightly different response, such as an oppositional response,
because of laughs where they offend religious values of people. Oppositional answer is the third

form of decoding. This reaction totally conflicts with the message of the producers and, based on
the social status of the recipients, they will condemn the philosophy of the producers. Many
shows highlight many cultural and religious prejudices in the "Family Guy" franchise that can
annoy anyone so much instead of getting a kick out of them. For instance, Peter is carrying a
terrorist with a bomb inside a black truck in the photo you see on the left, and is stopped by a
police officer at a toll booth, who only uses a skin colour map to detect a threat.
Because Peter is a white man, it is expected to be perfect, but he will immediately be searched
and probably arrested if a coloured male was driving a black van. Some of these assumptions
portrayed in this show are flat out outrageous and very disrespectful to many minority
communities because there are many kinds of prejudice that people of colour go through in
American society and it can be very hurtful rather than humorous to see some sort of symbolism
in this family guy episode. The encoding and decoding paradigm of Stuart Hall is of immense
significance to today's media because we as audiences, must be sceptical of media research.
What we watch, read or listen to must be carefully examined because the encoded message of the
producers may sound innocuous and quite in your favour of personal values, but if you do not
decipher the message transmitted by the producer efficiently, you as a viewer may be at risk of
being adversely affected by the ideologies of the producers. In American society today, media
sources such as Facebook, Twitter and news networks influence the ideals and perceptions of
societies and populations by supplying infinite quantities of data that remind people of what is
happening in today's society and around the world. The newspaper also updates the statistics and
reports political affairs such as election elections, demonstrations, and even the "war on terror."
News networks such as CNN and Fox report tales of national, economic and social interests that
are experienced on a regular basis by the American people. Noam Chomsky argues passionately
that the information business was built on the basis of a manipulation paradigm, according to the
American philosopher and author of Manufacturing Consent, where media coverage is distorted
by capitalist news media that manufacture inexpensive and deceptive news content to make a
profit and convince people to think in a way that meets the collective interests of the major cities.
This power elite tradition of shaping and concealing the facts about the news they cover is
harmful and disturbing to society because we build a fake reality, where we conscientiously
assume that what we watch is what happens around us and discourages us from thinking
objectively about the local and global challenges we face today.

As a mass service, the advent of the Internet has repositioned consumers as constructive as well
as active. In addition to the ongoing process of understanding and reacting to professionally
created cultural products, consumers produce and share their own content, upload original
images, videos, and opinions on social networking platforms, become "citizen journalists," and
work together to establish new cultural resources. It is not possible to thoroughly embrace this
current diversity of placed communicative activity.
Accommodated within the encoding/decoding model words, although a suitable alternate
definition and research language remains elusive. Around the same time, in many industrialised
capitalist nations, the digitalization of the media has coincided with the introduction of neoliberal
economic strategies that have redistributed money from the bottom to the top and increased
disparities of income. In the increasingly developing research areas of production studies and
critical political economy, these options, and the structural and political factors driving them,
were explored; but the findings of this work were never systematically integrated into the
paradigm of encoding/decoding. As a result, as JustinWren-Lewis has pointed out the paradigm
characterises television mainly as' reproducing meanings (or not) rather than creating them'
despite its focus on agency and the' relative autonomy' of technical activities, a stance that
maintains clear traces of a relay view, which it was intended to abolish, about how ideological
superiority is secured. However it plays out in real development conditions, he admits, "a
complex matter that can not be further spelled out here" (p. 15). The issue was that this "matter"
was never discussed in later work.
About encoding/decoding. The working of technical codes was instead inferred from the final
organisation and type of communication. Two main tasks for study are to model the changing
class hierarchy and track its effect on cultural agencies. At the first methodological obstacle, as
Morley's respondents failed to fit neatly into the categories, the simplistic tripartite division of a
class-based meaning scheme suggested by Parkin, which was fundamental to the original
encoding/decoding paradigm, collapsed. Bourdieu's more detailed map has now been displaced,
but this too, is subject to scepticism and reservations (see, e.g., Flemmen, 2013). So we are left
with the same basic task, announced in the original paper of Umberto Eco, to establish an
account of the relationships between cultural experience and the institutional location that entails
skilled producers and audiences within the same theoretical context, while also taking into
account the changing relationships between them. This is a company that is unfinished.

Elephants seen by multiple blind people by Stuart Hall, each of the Encoding/Decoding Model
would not have came from blind people as a result of chance provides different definition.
Circumstances had to prompt him to whatever section of the elephants he was touching. The
Encoding/Decoding Model can be formulated this way. Bittner's freedom is characterised as
democratisation, which guarantees freedom. In part, Hall established his approach as a
preference and expression of views without any response to a tradition of Marxist film criticism
contained in the constraints of the message sender. The film journal The Screen, which regarded
mainstream Stuart Hall, maintains that " the extent of famous films' connotation as
fundamentally disappointing and respectful of the visual symbol, its contextual relation and elite-
dominated status quo-a perception pioneered by positioning in numerous discursive fields of
meaning and Frankfurt School. 'Frankfurt School applies to the affiliation community, the stage
where scholars who originally served at the Frankfurt Institute have already coded signs
Since taking on new, more active ideological aspects, Nazis came to power, they intersected with
the deep symbolic codes of a society and social science and immigrated to the USA.

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