Communication is not seen as straightforward delivery of meaning from producer to audience in media studies, instead meaning is created through the process of encoding and decoding – a theory developed by Stuart Hall (1980). Hall’s approach challenges the idea that media messages have fixed meanings or are understood widely by the audience, putting emphasis on the role of culture, power and social context in the shaping of the interpretation of a product.
Encoding refers to the way in which media producers will construct messages for the audience that utilise particular frameworks of knowledge, language and ideologies. The production institutions will often encode their texts with what would be known as a preferred meaning in Hall’s theory. A preferred meaning reflects dominant values, for example within news coverage of situations such as protests, they will often encode messages using language such as ‘disorder’ or ‘disruption’ to frame these protestors as problematic rather than politically driven or with meaningful intent.
A real example of this can be found in how UK tabloids choose to cover climate activism, often encoding protests as inconveniences to the public rather than as responses and stances to the environmental state of the world. Representations like these are reflections of the priorities that institutions who hold influence over the audiences and provide ideological assumptions about law, politics and economic stability within a country or area.
According to Hall, audiences will decode media text into three different ways, depending on their social positions, personal experiences and identity. He discusses three positions within decoding: dominant, negotiated and oppositional. (Hall, 1980). Examples of audiences decoding can be discussed using the Barbie (2023) film which led some viewers to adapt a dominant reading, mainly the targeted female audience who view the film as a piece of feminist media critiquing the patriarchy and uplifting women on a global scale. Whilst those who weren’t necessarily part of the target audience yet still found some relatability presented negotiated readings enjoying how the film challenged social norms and approached the strengths of women and feminism. Finally the audience members who rejected the message of the movie entirely, giving an oppositional reading and viewing the movie as superficial or even misandrist. This wide range of interpretations for one product demonstrate how meaning is not fixed by the producer.
Digital platforms create complications when it comes to encoding and decoding as these apps and platforms encourage audiences not to be passive consumers, allowing them to be both producers and interpreters of content – leading us astray from traditional power dynamics between the audience and the producers. Examples of this could be the increased usage of memes and trending jokes during major political events, whilst one audience member may use a meme encoded with satirical intentions, a fellow audience member may decode this with an oppositional reading and view it as offensive. David Buckingham argued that digital media environments, such as social media, encourage contested and unstable meanings (Buckingham 2008). This can be further exampled through the #MeToo movement which initially was encoded through women sharing testimonies to highlight and discuss systemised misogyny and systemic assault on women, the movement was decoded in a variety of ways. Majority of audiences took a preferred or negotiated reading, recognising it as a call for accountability in a damaged system, whilst others produced oppositional readings and viewed the movement as harmful to men and young boys.
Within media texts, encoding and decoding remains useful for analysing power and representation, these texts often give privilege to dominant perspectives however when considering the concept of decoding it showcases how audiences are able to resist or reinterpret these messages presented by producers. Allowing for arguments and discussions challenging previous theories surrounding audiences being passive consumers and instead highlighting a want for audiences to challenge meanings whilst still recognising institutional power within media.
Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding remains essential to media texts and through examples such as news coverage and digital activism we can demonstrate how within media, meaning is not simply transmitted but something that an audience actively discovers, constructs and contests.
Bibliography
Buckingham, D. (2008) Youth, identity, and digital media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hall, S. (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’, in Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (eds.) Culture, media, language. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–138.
