Encoding/decoding model of communication: Difference between revisions

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Because the audience has part of the aspect of decoding performed already on behalf of the message-makers, there are three possible responses in a tele-visual discourse.

=== Dominant Hegemonic Position ===

When an audience interprets the message as it was meant to be understood, they are operating in the dominant code. The position of professional broadcasters and media producers is that messages are already signified within the hegemonic manner to which they are accustomed. Professional codes for media organizations serve to contribute to this type of industrial psychology. The producers and the audience are in harmony, understanding, communicating, and sharing mediated signs in the established mindset of framing.

=== Negotiated Position ===

Not all audiences may understand what media producers take for granted. There may be some acknowledgement of differences in understanding:<blockquote>Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules - it operates with exceptions to the rule.<ref>{{cite journal|title=Encoding/Decoding|pages=175}}</ref> </blockquote> While the hegemonic view and dominant definitions will tie events to "grand totalizations" as Hall calls them, negotiated positions are the result of the audience struggling to understand the dominant position or experiencing dissonance with those views.

=== Globally Contrary Position ===

When media consumers understand the contextual and literary inflections of a text yet decode the message by a completely oppositional means, this is the globally contrary position. The de-totalization of that text enables them to rework it to their preferred meaning. This requires operating with an oppositional code which can understand dominant hegemonic positions while finding frameworks to refute them. Hall feels that this position is necessary to begin a struggle in discourse, or the "politics of signification."