![]() Hall’s appropriation of a Marxist vocabulary allows him to replace the linearity of traditional models of communication with a circuit. This model comprises a number of what Hall terms ‘moments’ (such as circulation and distribution) but is primarily concerned with the points of production/encoding and consumption/decoding. ![]() Hall’s concern with the social and political dimensions of communication is apparent from the very beginning of his essay, which proposes an alternative to the ‘sender–message–receiver’ model of communication based on Marx’s theory of commodity production. It must also include a concern with the ‘social relations’ of the communicative process.(E/D73:1) Though I shall adopt a semiotic perspective, I do not regard this as indexing a closed formal concern with the immanent organisation of the television discourse alone. It occurs because communication has no choice but to take place within sign systems. This ‘lack of fit’ is crucial to Hall’s argument. There is a ‘lack of fit’ Hall suggests ‘between the two sides in the communicative exchange’ (E/D: 131), between the moment of the production of the message (‘encoding’) and the moment of its reception (‘decoding’). Distortion is built into the system here, rather than being a ‘failure’ of the producer or viewer. For all its ‘realism’ and emphasis on ‘the facts’, the documentary form still has to communicate through a sign system (the aural-visual signs of tv) that both distorts the intentions of producers and evokes contradictory feelings in the audience. Just because a documentary on asylum seekers aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight, does not guarantee its audience will view them sympathetically. Hall’s essay challenges all three components of the mass communications model, arguing that (i) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender (ii) the message is never transparent and (iii) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. As we will see, Hall is especially interested in the way different audiences generate rather than discover meaning. For Hall, this communication process is too neat: ‘the only distortion in it is that the receiver might not be up to the business of getting the message he or she ought to get’ (RED: 253). According to this model, the sender creates the message and fixes its meaning, which is then communicated directly and transparently to the recipient. ![]() This model moves in a linear fashion from the ‘sender’ through the ‘message’ to the ‘receiver’. ‘Encoding/decoding’ opens with an account of the conventional model of communication to be found within mass communications research. ‘Encoding/decoding’ arises primarily from Hall’s reservations about the theories of communication underpinning mass communications research. ![]() Basically, where traditionally the meaning of the media message was viewed as static, transparent and unchanging throughout the communication process, Hall argues that the message sent is seldom (if ever) the one received and that communication is systematically distorted. Focusing on the communication processes at stake in televisual discourse, the essay challenges some of the most cherished views of how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed in order to propose a new theory of communication. The essay is conventionally viewed as marking a turning point in Hall’s and the CCCS’s research, towards structuralism, allowing us to reflect on some of the main theoretical developments at Birmingham. Analysis of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decodingīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on NovemĪrguably the single most widely circulated and debated of all Hall’s papers, ‘ Encoding/decoding’ (1973/1980) had a major impact on the direction of cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s and its central terms remain keywords in the field.
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