Encoding and Decoding:
Understanding media isn’t just about what we watch, read, or scroll. It’s how meaning is created, communicated and interpreted. Stuart Hall’s theory about encoding and decoding reshaped how audiences think and perceive media as a whole. This framework of encoding and decoding helps how people can interpret different types of media differently.
Encoding:
Encoding is the production of a media message and how factors can impact this production. The producer or sender must appreciate how their audience understands the world first before sending out the message. Producers use verbal or nonverbal symbols to communicate. From this, the producer attempts to encode messages in a way that they think the receiver or decoder will be able to understand and encode.
Decoding:
The process of decoding is where an audience member understands and interprets the original encoded message. Stuart Hall describes decoding in 3 terms of theories of participation, including the dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. Dominate (or the hegemonic) decoding position is the understanding that the decoder decoded the text or media by how the encoder encoded it. There is no misunderstanding between the sender and receiver and all expectations are met. The negotiated decoding position is a mixture of adaptive and oppositional factors. This is when the decoder understood the message based on their own social background, neither agreeing or disagreeing with the producer. Finally, there is the oppositional decoding position, or the confrontational position. This is based on the audience’s personal experience and background and is inconsistent with the original dominant coding. The audience is unwilling to illustrate the connotation and meaning of the information in the way set by the producer.
Examples:
There are a lot of examples out there that are a direct point to encoding and decoding a piece of media. One example I found was in pop culture which was decoding “The Dress” photo. The original encoding of the photo was intended to be the actual colors of the dress. However, the audience that decoded the photo led to different interpretations based on how the people perceived the colors and what some people saw, other people might have seen something completely different.
Another example is in the news. For instance, a viewer can decode a headline from a reliable and popular news source about a political event with the same political ideology as the producers. But another viewer from a different political background who is unfamiliar with the outlet might decode it a different way.
Outro:
Media is never a one way transfer of meaning. It’s a constant negotiation between the producer’s intentions and the audience’s lived experiences, beliefs, and social constructs. Decoding a message can lead to multiple interpretations, including dominant, negotiated, or oppositional. This is why two people can look at the same piece of media and have completely different interpretations and understandings. Stuart Hall’s framework reminds us that meanings aren’t fixed, they are made. This encourages us to think critically about how we interpret everyday media and how different backgrounds shape interpretations. Encoding and decoding isn’t just a media studies concept, it is a tool we can use to navigate the messages around us.
Refrences:
https://blog.richmond.edu/watchingthewire/files/2015/08/Encoding-Decoding.pdf
