Encoding/decoding model of communication: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:12, 19 December 2020

Revision as of 16:12, 19 December 2020

Line 55:

===Oppositional position===

Lastly, there is the oppositional position or code. Hall summarizes that a viewer can understand the literal (denotative) and connotative meanings of a message while decoding a message in a globally contrary way. This means that a person recognizes that their meaning is not the dominant meaning, or what was intended, but alters the message in their mind to fit an "alternative framework of reference"<ref name="Hall"/> It is more like that receiver decode a different message. Thus, readers' or viewers social situation has placed them in a directly oppositional relationship to the dominant code, and although they understand the intended meaning they do not share the text's code and end up rejecting it. Again, this code is based very much on experiences. One's personal experiences will likely influence them to take on the oppositional position when they encode hegemonic positions. Highly political discourse emerges from these oppositional codes as "events which are normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an oppositional reading."<ref name="Hall"/>kml mkn.iom,ho,

==The encoding/decoding model critique==

Line 67 ⟶ 66:

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 reading'. There might be confusion between referring ‘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 Obama CareObamaCare. 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).