Stuart Hall - Encoding and decoding model

Stuart Hall - Encoding and decoding model


1.The media industry tend to focus on three main areas:



- Institution: The people who produce texts and their reasons for it, the endcoders. Factors considered might be the encoders social background, i.e. religion, race etc, and their available budget for the production. These all contribute to the overall media product.

- The Content: The actual content of the media text itself. Exploring the genre, codes and conventions, narrative and representation.

- Audience: The media industry looks at who the audience are, the impact the text may have on them and their reactions to the media text.

2. Those who create media texts are known as encoders. The encoders create meaning and connotations for their text, keeping in mind an assumption of how the text will be understood and how the targeted audience will receive the text.

3. The audience, also referred to as decoders, will all take a meaning out of the text. This may vary from person to person as they try to understand the encoders intended meaning.

4. All signs and symbols are polysemic and thus all media texts are polysemic. Each individual will decode media texts in a different way. Hall suggest there are 4 key ways in which media texts are decoded:


•Dominant reading: the reader fully shares the text’s code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading.


•Negotiated reading: the reader partly shares the text’s code and broadly accepts the dominant reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way that reflects their own position, experiences, and interests.


•Oppositional reading: the reader is in a social situation that places him or her in direct opposition to the dominant code. The reader understands the dominant reading but does not share the text’s code and rejects the reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference.


•Aberrant reading: the reader is unable to take the meaning that the encoder put into the text. There is a gap (dissonance) between the cultural assumptions of the encoder and the cultural context of the decoder. They just don’t get it.

5.When creating a media text, all encoders often wants their audience to take a dominant reading approach. To ensure their texts are received in such as way by the audience, the encoder may try and make the text less polysemic and not as open to multiple meanings.

6. Encoders will try to speak to their audience in an appropriate way so that they will understand and relate to the text. This is known as the mode of address. Usually the encoders will make assumptions about the decoders knowledge, interests and perception of the world, encoding their texts accordingly.[Take girl's magazines for example.] These are assumptions are cultural and can have an impact on the way the decoder receives the text.

7. The assumed language and points of reference an encoder uses to connect with an assumed target audience is known as the ‘Public Idiom.’