Hall is a representative of the cultural studies. His research results represent the highest level of the cultural studies. His most important contribution is the famous encoding and decoding theory. Hall believes that the communication process includes two processes: encoding and decoding.
Encoding
Hall believes that any information must be encoded before entering the field of mass communication, and symbols are a unique form of information dissemination. Encoding is the process by which communicators ‘symbolize’ and ‘give meaning’ to social things through the selection and processing of symbolic things. The symbolization activities of mass media are essentially ‘giving meaning’ to things according to the value system of the dominant class.
Decoding
Hall believes that the audience’s symbol interpretation process is not completely passive. Due to the ambiguity of symbols and the diversity of audience backgrounds, the audience can make a variety of understandings of text information. He divides the audience’s interpretation positions into three categories: priority interpretation, compromise interpretation, and confrontational interpretation.
- Priority interpretation: the audience decodes within the scope of the dominant code, that is, the audience interprets the content of the communication completely according to the communicator’s intention. This is related to factors such as the credibility of the source and the audience’s existing position.
- Compromise interpretation: the audience understands the message partly according to the meaning given by the communicator and partly according to their own experience background.
- Confrontational interpretation: the audience interprets the meaning of the media prompts in a completely opposite way.
For online sports news, readers generally interpret in priority, compromise and confrontational, which means agree, basically agree but question, and completely disagree. For those netizens who disagree with the news report, they want to reconstruct the news discourse and comment field by expressing opposing views. Readers who accustomed to identify with the news text and express the same-direction comments are usually supporters of a sports organization in the news. They regard themselves as the position occupant and the leader of discourse power in the news field of the sports organization, and regard opposing opinions as a struggle for the dominance of the field. Therefore, they will use ’information capital‘ to organize views and language to fight back. Nowadays, readers are increasingly forming the habit of posting comments after reading articles, expressing different opinions. Readers who agree or basically agree will use the information provided by the news text as ‘information capita’ and compete with readers who completely disagree with the view.
All in all, Hall’s encoding and decoding theory reveals that mass communication plays an important ideological role in defining social relations and exercising political power. On the other hand, it shows that the audience is not passive or negative when interpreting information, but has the ability to interpret it independently.
Reference:
Hsu, H. (2017) Stuart Hall and the rise of Cultural Studies, The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/stuart-hall-and-the-rise-of-cultural-studies (Accessed: 17 November 2024).
Media Studies (2022) Stuart Hall’s reception theory: Encoding and decoding the Media, Media Studies. Available at: https://media-studies.com/reception-theory/ (Accessed: 17 November 2024).
Pillai, P. (1992) ‘Rereading Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model’, Communication Theory, 2(3), pp. 221–233. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.1992.tb00040.x.
