Have you ever watched a foreign film or drama with subtitles and noticed how a single translated line completely changes a character’s personality? Or scrolled through TikTok comments under a scene you found deeply emotional, only to find thousands of viewers laughing at it as an ironic meme?
For decades, traditional mass communication models assumed media worked like a simple delivery truck: a creator packs a specific meaning into a message, sends it through a screen, and the audience unpacks that exact same meaning on the other end. In 1973, cultural theorist Stuart Hall dismantled that illusion with his groundbreaking Encoding/Decoding model.
Hall argued that media production and consumption are two distinct, active moments of meaning-making. First, producers encode a message—wrapping ideas in visual framing, editing, dialogue, and cultural assumptions—usually embedding a “dominant-hegemonic” (preferred) reading that they want the audience to accept. However, once that media hits the screen, producers lose absolute control. Audiences decode the text through their own social backgrounds, languages, and lived experiences. According to Hall (1980), viewers generally fall into three decoding positions:
- Dominant-hegemonic: Accepting the producer’s intended message at face value.
- Negotiated: Acknowledging the intended message, while adapting or questioning parts of it based on personal context.
- Oppositional: Rejecting the intended framing entirely and reading the message against the grain.
Working across Korean, Japanese, and English media—and spending way too much time analyzing how global shows get localized—I see Hall’s model play out every single day.
When a Korean drama or a Japanese series is produced, the creators encode intricate layers of local social hierarchy, unspoken politeness, and cultural idioms directly into the dialogue. A subtle shift from formal speech to casual speech (banmal in Korean or tameguchi in Japanese) carries massive narrative weight; it signals intimacy, disrespect, or a sudden power shift without a single word of explanation. When those shows travel globally, localization teams have to translate not just vocabulary, but entire cultural frameworks within tight character limits. Yet, even with the most thoughtful subtitles, international audiences rarely decode the story in the exact way domestic viewers do.
Take the global phenomenon of Squid Game, for example. While Korean audiences immediately decoded the series through the visceral lens of local household debt crises, hyper-competitive education, and subtle linguistic shifts in honorifics, many international viewers watched it through a negotiated or even oppositional lens—treating the stark critique of late-stage capitalism primarily as a high-concept aesthetic thrill ride, or turning grim survival games into viral TikTok challenges and reality game shows. As Dal Yong Jin (2023) notes in his research on transnational media flows, global streaming platforms accelerate cross-border circulation, yet local cultural reception remains deeply fragmented by each audience’s domestic reality.
We see this exact friction in everyday social media culture, too. Brands, filmmakers, and celebrities constantly encode polished, earnest narratives into their campaigns. Yet, digital audiences are notoriously fluent in oppositional decoding—pausing a single frame, clipping a three-second reaction out of context, and repurposing a serious dramatic moment into a sarcastic reaction meme within hours. As media scholar John Fiske (1989) argued when expanding on Hall’s work, popular culture isn’t what industries force onto passive consumers; it is what audiences actively make out of the cultural resources handed to them.
Furthermore, modern comment sections and reaction videos have turned decoding from a solitary mental act into a collective performance. Before we even finish processing how we feel about a scene, scrolling through the replies nudges us to adopt a shared negotiated or oppositional reading alongside thousands of strangers.
Stuart Hall’s theory reminds us that meaning is never permanently locked inside a video file, a script, or a subtitle track. A show isn’t finished when the director yells “cut” or when the translation file is exported. It is finished in the mind of the viewer—and because none of us bring the exact same linguistic and cultural baggage to the screen, we are never really watching the exact same story.
References
- Fiske, J. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
- Hall, S. (1973) Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), University of Birmingham.
- Hall, S. (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’, in Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (eds.) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–138.
- Jin, D.Y. (2023) ‘Transnational cultural flows and local reception: Re-reading global Korean wave audiences’, Media, Culture & Society, 45(4), pp. 712–728.
