Stuart Hall’s essay on decoding and encoding is founded on interrelationship of four central pillars (production, circulation, use and reproduction) that set it aside from traditional theories of communication that conceptualize the communication process in the form of a loop or circulation circuit (Hall 91). Hall considers each of the central pillars distinct from each other, as well as both intricate and powerful enough to define one another. Effectively, each of the four elements is separate from the next, but they all form a part of a system is the communication process, which should ensure that meaning is transferred to the intended parties and feedback is received.
The relevance of this interrelationship to the modern media house is impossible to over-emphasize. Media houses and other content providers require the right expertise and resources (scriptwriters, journalists and equipment) or what Stuart refers to as the material instruments to produce and circulate the content to different audiences. CNN and BBC have better means than local media houses, thus better content, and circulation ability, which allows them to reach larger audiences. However, the process does not stop at the ability to produce and disseminate great content, although production and circulation influence and use and reproduction (decoding). It is just as important to articulate meaning by manipulating the rules communication and engagement with the audience e.g. in the wording of the message, use of visual aids and technology. Unfortunately, messages become imprinted with institutional power structures/relations, which shape its meaning. Thus, the success of any communication lies in the ability of the sender to anticipate the relations and the recipients to decode the varied influences on the message. For instance, a person viewing a news item on a social media website should accord it less importance because they cannot verify the content’s credibility, compared to CNN or the BBC for instance.
Effectively, each stage of the process uniquely affects the message. It is interesting that even at the time when Stuart Hall wrote this piece and given the dominant practice of traditional theories of communication, he still understood that the audience is not a passive participant in the communication process. This was long before the 24-hour news cycle and the explosion of the internet (social media), which have forced even the most conservative of media houses to awaken to the active audience concept. With social media for instance, traditional media houses are only serving as facilitators of the audience sharing in the production, dissemination, use and reproduction of the message. It is no longer strange for large media houses to report about trending topics of Twitter, or pick up news items from social media. Official websites now have comment sections and corporations across the world heavily invest in data mining in order to understand their audiences better and thus understand ways to manipulate the rules of discourse in order to facilitate the communication process.
According to Hall (1977), decoding messages is an intricate sense-making process by the audience, which is influenced by a huge range of factors including the audience’s economic and social conditions. This is why a perfect fit must exist between encoder of information and the decoders for communication to be effective. For marketers and corporations, this is indispensable for success, and it is in part the reason companies and products have specific audiences that they cater for. In the United States for instance, there are media houses/services that cater for conservative and liberal markets e.g. FoxNews and the New York Times respectively.
Hall uses the television as a complex connotative sign that comprises of two visual and aural types of discourse, besides it being an iconic sign because it has some attributes of the thing that it represents. The reality embodied in communication exists outside the language or other codes, and language simply tries to capture the reality. Hall refers to three hypothetical decoding positions that audiences can occupy. The dominant hegemonic position occurs when the audience understand connoted meaning by decoding codes used. For instance, financial and economic experts readily understand Bloomberg TV content, and they are said to be operating within a dominant hegemonic code. There is also a negotiated position occurs when audiences understand codes using adaptive and oppositional elements i.e. use of accepted ground rules. Hall refers to hierarchical organization of meanings and the manner in which at times events that breach our knowledge of social structures are assigned to their discursive domains through a negotiated process. Lastly, the oppositional counter-hegemonic code decoding by which viewers understand the literal and connotative inflection in a discourse, but interpret them in widely different ways such as cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist that are understood different in Denmark and the Muslim World.
Hall (1977) captures the manner in which communication works as a process, and the interrelationships of its varied aspects. Audiences are faced with a huge range of messages, whose understanding is dependent on the existent institutional power-relations and codes. This article foreshadows the powerful data mining, audience feedback and other aspects that shape the success or failure of modern corporations not only in the media, but also across all industries. With the three hypothetical decoding positions, Hall captures the manner/process through which societies/cultures impose classifications of meaning on its members depending on the institutional power relations. These in turn shape the four central pillars of the communication process.
Discussion Questions:
- How do organizations use Hall’s hypothetical decoding positions idea to ensure cross-cultural communication is successful
- How do power and socioeconomic structures shape communication?
Works Cited
Hall, Stuart. "Encoding, Decoding." During, Simon. The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1977. Print.
