Encoding/decoding model of communication: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:24, 18 April 2024

Revision as of 02:31, 26 April 2024

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These four stages are:<ref name="Encoding and Decoding" />

#'''''Production''''' – This is where the encoding, the construction of a message begins. Production process has its own "discursive" aspect, as it is also framed by meanings and ideas; by drawing upon society's dominant ideologies, the creator of the message is feeding off of society's beliefs, and values. Numerous factors are involved in the production process. On one hand "knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audience"<ref name="Encoding and Decoding" /> form the "production structures of the television."<ref name="Encoding and Decoding" /> On the other hand, "topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, ‘definitions'definitions of the situation' from other sources and other discursive formations"<ref name="Encoding and Decoding" /> form the other part of wider socio-cultural and political structure.

#'''''Circulation''''' – How individuals perceive things: visual vs. written. How things are circulated influences how audience members will receive the message and put it to use. According to Philip Elliott the audience is both the "source" and the "receiver" of the television message. For example, circulation and reception of a media message are incorporated in the production process through numerous "feedbacks." So circulation and perception, although not identical, are certainly related to and involved into the production process.

#'''''Use''''' (distribution or consumption) – For a message to be successfully "realized", "the broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of a meaningful discourse."<ref name="Encoding and Decoding" /> This means that the message has to be adopted as a meaningful discourse and it has to be meaningfully decoded. However, the decoding/interpreting of a message requires active recipients.

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David Morley is a sociologist who studies the sociology of the television audience. Known for being a key researcher in conducting [[The Nationwide Project]] in the late 1970s, Morley took this popular news program that aired daily on BBC. It reported on national news from London and the major events of the day, and was broadcast throughout the UK. He applied Hall's [[reception theory]] to study the encoding/decoding model of this news program. This study focused on the ways this program addressed the audience member and the ideological themes it presented. Morley then took it a step further and conducted qualitative research that included individuals with varying social backgrounds. This was where Hall's research came into play. He wanted to see how they would react to certain clips of the program based on Hall's three decoding methods: dominant/hegemonic, negotiated, or oppositional.{{Cn|date=October 2021}}

[[Janice Radway]], an American literary and cultural studies scholar, conducted a study on women in terms of romance reading. In her book ''[[Reading the Romance|Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature]]'', Radway studied a group of midwestern women that were fans of romance novels. She argued that this cultural activity functioned as personal time for women that didn'tdid not typically have any personal time to themselves.<ref name="Media & Culture" /> Although her work was not seen as scientific, and her study applied only to a small group of women, she was interested in interpreting how women could relate their everyday life to a fiction book.<ref name="Media & Culture" /> As a result, her study demonstrated that these studies define culture in very broad terms, because in the end culture is made up of the symbols of expression that society uses to make sense of everyday life.<ref name="Media & Culture" /> Radway's audience research worked off of Hall's theory of encoding/decoding. Studying how specific individuals receive and interpret messages based on their backgrounds was something that played a huge role in Radway's study on women. Some women related to the book and some identified as though they were characters in the book; but the meaning, dependent upon their backgrounds, identities and beliefs, circulates within society and is reinforced by Hall's theory of encoding/decoding.

== Three positions upon decoding messages ==

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==The encoding/decoding model critique==

Hall's encoding/decoding model has left its proponents with three main problems to solve.<ref>{{cite journal|first1=Shangwei|last1=Wu|first2=Tabe|last2=Bergman|url=http://www.participations.org/Volume%2016/Issue%201/7.pdf|title=An active, resistant audience – but in whose interest? Online discussions on Chinese TV dramas as maintaining dominant ideology|journal=Participations: International Journal of Audience Research|volume=16|issue=1|date=May 2019|page=23}}</ref> The first problem concerns [[polysemy]]. The three positions of decoding proposed by Hall are based on the audience's conscious awareness of the intended meanings encoded into the text. In other words, these positions – agreement, negotiation, opposition – are in relation to the intended meaning. However, polysemy means that the audience may create new meanings out of the text. The audience's perceived meanings may not be intended by the producers. Therefore, ‘polysemy’'polysemy' and ‘opposition’'opposition' should be seen as two analytically distinct processes, although they do interconnect in the overall reading process.<ref>Morley, D. (2006). Unanswered questions in audience research. ''The Communication Review 9''(2), 101–121.</ref><ref name="doi.org">Schrøder, K. C. (2000). Making sense of audience discourses: Towards a multidimensional model of mass media reception. ''European Journal of Cultural Studies 3''(2), 233–258. https://doi.org/10.1177/136754940000300205</ref> The second problem relates to aesthetics. TV viewers may take an aesthetically critical stance towards the text, commenting on the paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects of textual production. Underlying this is the viewers’viewers' awareness of the ‘constructedness’'constructedness' of the text, which is a different dimension from meaning making in the decoding process.<ref name="doi.org"/><ref>Michelle, C. (2007). Modes of reception: A consolidated analytical framework. ''The Communication Review 10''(3), 181–222. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420701528057

</ref> The third problem addresses the positions of encoding. Hall's model does not differentiate the various positions media producers may take in relation to the dominant ideology. Instead, it assumes that encoding always takes place within a dominant-hegemonic position.<ref name=":0">Ross, S. (2011, May 25th). The encoding/decoding model revisited: ''Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association''. Boston, MA.</ref>

Ross<ref name=":0"/> suggests two ways to modify Hall's typology of the Encoding/Decoding Model by expanding the original version.<ref name="Encoding and Decoding" /> While presenting the modified typology, Ross stresses that his suggested version doesn'tdoes not imply to replace the original model but rather to expand it and to let the model work in a new way. Further is the explanation of one of the alternative models suggested by Ross,<ref name=":0" /> which is a more complex typology consisting of nine combinations of encoding and decoding positions (Figure 1 and Figure 2). The reasons why the original model needs to be revisited and the alternative model description to follow.

In line with previous scholarship criticizing Hall's model, Ross<ref name=":0" /> and Morley<ref name=":1">Morley, D. (2006). Unanswered questions in audience research. ''Communication Review 9''(2), 101-121.</ref> argue that the model has some unsolved problems. First, Morley mentions that in the decoding stage there is a need to distinguish comprehension of the text and its evaluation. Comprehension here refers to the reader's understanding of the text in the basic sense and the sender's intention, and to possible readers interpretations of the text (borrowed from Schroder<ref name=":2">Schrøder, K. (2000). Making sense of audience discourses: Towards a multidimensional model of mass media reception. ''European Journal of Cultural Studies 3''(2), 233-258.</ref>). Evaluation is how readers relate the text to the ideological position (also borrowed from Schroder<ref name=":2" />).

Second, Morley<ref name=":1" /> discusses the problem of understanding the concept of ‘oppositional'oppositional reading'. There might be confusion between referring ‘oppositional'oppositional reading' to rejecting the preferred meaning (dominant ideology) and to disagreement with the text. For example, imagine that an oppositional TV channel produced a news story about some flaws in the ObamaCare. According to the original model, a reader can fully share the text's code and accept its meaning, or reject it and bring an alternative frame of it. In the first case nevertheless a reader fully agrees with the text, s/he would be in opposition to the dominant ideology (we understand dominant ideology here as promoting government initiatives), while in the second case by disagreeing with the news story a reader would actually favor dominant ideology. That leads to the final problem of the original model -- assuming that all the media encode texts within the dominant ideology and thus suggesting that media is homogeneous in nature.<ref name=":0" />

In order to address these problems, Ross<ref name=":0" /> suggests two steps in modifying the original model. The first step is to distinguish between the graphical model and the typology, which is different decoding positions (dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional). The second step is to divide the model into two versions, an ideology version (Figure 1) and a text-related version (Figure 2).

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{{=}} ''Agreement with oppositional text''

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The main addition in both new typologies of Hall's model are two types of encoding meanings, which are a Negotiated position and an Oppositional position. As the original model makes all media institutions encode messages in the dominant-hegemonic manner,<ref name="Encoding and Decoding" /> Ross<ref name=":0" /> takes a step further and ‘allow'allow' media institutions to encode texts according to the oppositional or negotiated framework. Thus, media texts in both Hall's versions can be dominant-hegemonic (Hall's assumed mode), partly critical or radical.

Another addition to the original model is the appearance of a Neutralization category meaning that media texts encoded within an oppositional or negotiated framework are decoded according to the dominant ideology. Let's look at the upper right corner of the Ross ideology version (Figure 1) at the cell when a radical text intersects with a dominant-hegemonic decoding position. For example, neutralization will happen if a TV news report conveying a message about an oppositional political party in Russia may be interpreted by a conservative viewer as an evidence of the US sponsorship of anti-government organizations underlying Russian independency. Let's now look at the lower right corner of the same version at the cell when a radical text is decoded by viewers within an oppositional position. In this case ‘oppositional'oppositional reading of oppositional text' needs explanation that it equals to the "agreement with oppositional text" as readers text evaluation might cause misunderstanding.

'''Figure 2. The modified encoding/decoding typology (text-relative version)'''<ref name=":0" />

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{{=}} ''Neutralization''

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In order to avoid misinterpretations and to make an alternative typology more reader-friendly, Ross suggests a text-relative version that stresses not the ideological tendency of the text, but rather if receivers are in agreement or opposition with any kind of text.<ref name=":0" /> In this version Ross changed the term 'dominant-hegemonic' to ‘text'text-acceptance'; and the term 'oppositional' to ‘text'text-oppositional' in order to remind readers the difference between opposition to the dominant ideology and opposition to the text.

In the text-relative version a Neutralization category moved to the lower right cell while saving its meaning. Neutralization means applying dominant ideology to the radical text or rejecting oppositional texts.

Wu and Bergman<ref>Wu, S., & Bergman, T. (2019). An active, resistant audience – but in whose interest? Online discussions on Chinese TV dramas as maintaining dominant ideology. ''Participations 16''(1), 23.</ref> propose a revision to Hall's encoding/decoding model in a different way. They conceptualize the adoption of certain codes by producers and viewers respectively as ''encoding strategies'' and ''decoding strategies''. For producers, encoding strategies are partly influenced by their imagination of how the audience will decode their products, which they conceptualize as the ''imagined decoding strategies''. For viewers, their awareness of the ‘constructedness’'constructedness' of the text means that from the text they also perceive, apart from its meaning, the encoding strategies, which are not necessarily the same strategies adopted by producers. These ''perceived encoding strategies'' constitute an important dimension of the decoding process. Based on their intended meanings and imagined decoding strategies, media producers execute certain encoding strategies and give a certain shape to the text. In the decoding process, viewers derive both perceived meanings and perceived encoding strategies from the text. From these two dimensions, viewers arrive at their evaluation of the text. This revised model admits the diversity of producers’producers' ideological positions in the encoding process. Clearly separating perceived meanings from intended meanings, it anticipates the situation of polysemy. By distinguishing between perceived meanings and perceived encoding strategies, it also gives space to audience's awareness of the ‘constructedness’'constructedness' of the text.

To conclude, while Hall's Encoding/Decoding model of communication is highly evaluated and widely used in research, it has been criticised as it contains some unsolved problems. This section discussed some flaws in the original model and introduced proposed revisions to Hall's typology.