The media industry, as a result of the rapid development of communication technologies, emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. Mechanization of information and cultural production provided a ground for a significant impulse for different political ideologies to successfully adopt new ways of information dissemination for their political purposes. The rise of communistic ideology on the “East” and fascism and nationalism on the “West” disclosed the power of propaganda, the role that media can play in the question of ruling the “masses” and possible threats to the world’s stability. Mass media as a phenomenon attracted the attention of a number of social-, philosophical- apolitical- science researchers and several scientific schools were established. Some of the works written within these schools become what we called ‘canons’ of media science. One of the schools - the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was located in Britain. In this essay, I focus on this school, its ideologist main and representative Stuart Hall and his writing “Encoding/Decoding”.
British cultural studies found their roots in the post-war development of Britain. The main historical context related to this school consists of the restoration of the capitalist industrial production, opposition to the Soviet communist ideology, establishing the state of the welfare and transformation of the class ideology (Turner, 2003). Meanwhile, the industrialization of mass media production communication and technology, as well as the Americanisation of the popular culture, have become obvious a played a major role in the Western countries and the interest of the researchers formed a landscape of different media-culture related schools.
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham was founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart and had been working primarily in media studies (Turner, 2003). Elihu Katz emphasized that the main motivations behind this project were to redefine the “culture” itself applying the anthropological approach focusing on the ways how media products become incorporated into our everyday life (Katz, 2003).
British school can be generally characterized by its ethnographic approach for the research and structural approach for culture analysis.
One of the important aspects of British cultural studies is its role in the reformation of Marxist thoughts which was reflected in “Culture and Society” published by Raymond Williams in 1958. New trends were introduced during the ongoing breakup of traditional Marxism, introducing ‘critical’ Marxism that established a wider autonomy for “culture” which in traditional theories was embedded in social structures as a “product of the economic and industrial base”(Turner, 2003) which let us see the British cultural studies as followers the critical tradition of Frankfurt school.
Another important characteristic of British cultural studies is its successful early adoption of the semiotic theories by Charles Sanders Peirce. Focusing on the importance of analysis of non-linguistic signs provided a fresh framework for new strategies in understanding media content and establishing media as an industry that has its main product - "meaning" manufactured by means of the structural model of signs. Thus, Hall introduced semiotics in the examination of the culture and culture products by understanding the sign as the smallest unit of communication within any language system, making a bridge between linguistics and cultural studies. That approach differs from British cultural studies from Toronto and Columbia school representatives which articulate their points mostly around the “message” concept.
Stuart Hall displays the influence of semiotics in his writing “Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse” where new paradigms were successfully included in social discourse and provided a new and wider framework for further media science and cultural critical researches. Being originally published in 1973 by the Center for Cultural Studies University of Birmingham, it was revisioned several times, and republished in 1980 in “Culture, Media, Language”.
Stuart Hall starts his original writing by establishing the aim of approaching concerns of 'televisual language' and 'cultural policies and programs’ in one single framework. Hall highlights the obvious differences between these concerns but states that “in the analysis of culture, the inter-connection between societal structures and processes and formal or symbolic structures is absolutely pivotal”(Hall, 1973), thus leading to the “encoding/decoding” idea as a focal point that could give a common ground for such analysis.
In early versions, Hall claims the “message” is the main object of production by television and the symbolic or discursive form of “message” has a “privileged position” in the process of communicative exchange (Hall, 1973). However, in the later versions, he introduced “meaning” as the “sign vehicle” which is organized by the operation of codes within “the syntagmatic chain of a discourse” (Hall, 1999).
Hall highlights, that the production process requires some technological instruments as well as social means that make communication valid. He points out that the nature of media is limited in the ways it can broadcast “raw” events and its detachment from objective reality in favor of creating linguistic structures that form a narrative or a “story” that itself is a coded “message”. “If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect” (Hall, 1999.)
Then Hall describes how institutional structures create a production chain that starts from the need for some kind of production and then constructs the “message” constructed by meaning and ideas and formed by the means of technological availabilities. He describes the framework as a circuit, where after the signal transmission, the stage of the decoding and meaning extraction is performed by the audience. He also highlights a strong connection between the process of consumption of the message and meaning with the production process. The ‘moment’ of consumption is“ ‘predominant’ according to Hall as it is the ‘point of departure for the realization’(Hall, 1999) of the “message.”
But what defines the keys of the encoding decoding processes? Hall maintains that decoding and encoding processes are asymmetrical and encoded result is not necessary to repeat the original message pointing to the possible reason that “distortions’ or ‘misunderstandings’ arise precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange”(Hall, 1999). Defining the nature of the encoding keys, Hall provides an example of the Western drama-entertainment genre and analyses its roots coming deep into the “archetypal American story” and history of expanding West which faces “Nature and Evil” on the virgin land where the characters of masculine prowess driven to their fate (Hall, 1973), thus highlighting the cultural origin of this codes and specify the way to trace them.
Talking about the complexity of the televisual signal, Hall points out the combination of visual and aural discourses, where the visual discourse corresponds to the iconic type of the
sign which is according to Hall is already a coded signal as it represents “the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the ‘real’”(Hall, 1999). Thus Hall brings to the surface the fact that televisual signal is not neutral and even with all seeming correspondence to the “real” world it has its embedded “message”.
Hall also introduces “connotation” and “denotation” into media discourse and emphasizes their distinctions from the original linguistic definitions. According to linguistic theories, denotation is presented as a set of things that a sense individuates and connotation as the speaker-oriented part that conveys an attitude or opinions of the word in addition to its literal meaning. However, Hall offers a different way to apply these definitions to the media theory focusing more on analytic ways to distinguish the part of the sign that deliver its literal meaning and these that represent associative meanings highlighting that generally, signs combine both the denotative and the connotative aspects. Hall argues that the denotative level of the televisual sign is represented by a set of fixed codes, meanwhile, the connotative level is more flexible and available for transformations. Moreover, connotative codes “are not equal among themselves” and every society imposes its own classifications which form a dominant cultural order.
At the end of his essay Hall describes three positions from which decoding of discourse can be performed. The dominant-hegemonic position is defined as a situation that is based on the direct decoding of a reference code from the televisual signal, described as the most transparent way of communication where the reader gets the message as it is and accepts it. Negotiated code contains oppositional and adaptive 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.”, thus reader read the coded message in the general but not fully accept it which usually arise the most of misunderstandings. Oppositional code decodes the message in a “globally contrary way”, which means that the reader rejects the message.
What is the main idea of Hall’s writing and why it’s so important for media science? First of all, the main idea that Hall delivers through his text is that no televisual signal is neutral or “objective”. Before the “Encoding/Decoding”, the main focus of the researches was concentrated on the idea of “message”(Chicago, Toronto schools), but its matter was more abstract and metaphorical than scientific.
Hall highlights the relationship between the roles of the broadcaster and the audience. The audience can decode the messages in different ways that are defined by the social, cultural, and political codes that the audience is bare. The role of misunderstanding was specified as possible in correspondence of these social codes and codes that were used for encoding the signal. Hall also argues that the act of decoding the signal is bound closely with the encoding process and they constitute the whole. The audience can, however, actively participate in the decoding process and choose the codes they can apply for decoding the signal.
Hall's work can be considered innovative and disruptive. Previous popular concepts were presuming the multilayer structure of the information flow but were insufficient in a way for making the analysis. So, for example, Shannon–Weaver’s model could be seen as a technical description of the TV communication but didn’t describe the processes of the interaction with signal and its value.
Another important aspect of Hall’s model is its ability to bind technical, cultural and cognitive aspects of communication. The whole of Pirce’s semiotic model, which plays the role of the core of the framework, made it available to review the signal as a triadic phenomenon and bind together signal as a sign, layers of denotation which is presented as an objective world and psychological process which presented by cognitive function of constructing meanings.
In order to understand the advantage of Hall’s approach, it’s worth comparing his work with the writing of Roland Barthes and focusing on several similarities as well as differences between their frameworks. Both Hall and Barthes analyze visual content and apply the semiotic approach. Both come to a conclusion of the non-neutrality of the signal and both include “connotation” and “denotation” concepts for content analysis. Both emphasized the differences between applying linguistic apparatus to the media science and both describe them from a new perspective: “We do not use the distinction – denotation/connotation – in this way. From our point of view, the distinction is an analytic one only”(Hall, 1999). Hall saw televisual signal as a flow of meaning creation, Roland Barthes states the similar about photography: “photographic message is a continuous code” (Barthes, 1961).
However, there are significant differences in their views as well. Barthes argues that photographic image is paradoxical as it contains two different messages, one of them is coded and one is plain or analog, which is in opposition to Hall, who describes the iconic type of the picture (analog) as “the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the ‘real’”(Hall, 1999), which directs to the point that even analog message shall be seen as encoded as well.
Roland Barthes’s writing is based on the less developed Ferdinand de Saussure framework and he failed to go beyond the dyadic relation “signifier-signified”, which significantly limits Barthes in his research. That modern semiotic approach gave Hall a significant advantage of the potential depth of the practical implementation of his framework.
There are several critical points about the “Encoding/Decoding” model. Linguistic polysemy is one of the problems that is not solved in this framework. Polysemy supposes that the audience can create meaning out of the visual signal which is independent of the content producers, or read the signs differently. Thus, it’s not only a misunderstanding or asymmetrical encoding process that took place but a principally new dimension of analysis different from the “opposition” perspective.
Another critical aspect, that Hall supposes the existence of the one hegemonic center of the domination ideology which defines the message and chooses the codes. However, that approach excludes more complex relationships between producers, media companies, investors, advertisers, etc., as well as market forces that were later argued to have the most influence on media production (Mcmanus, 1994).
Reference list
Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse. Center for Cultural Studies University of Birmingham Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT.
Hall, S. (1999). Encoding, Decoding. In: The Cultural studies Reader. London; New York: Routledge, pp.508–517.
Katz, E. (2003). Canonic texts in media research: are there any? should there be? how about these? Cambridge: Polity Press ; Malden, Ma.
Mcmanus, J.H. (1994). Market driven journalism: let the citizen beware? Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, [20]00.
Turner, G. (2003). British cultural studies: an introduction. London; New York: Routledge.
