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Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse
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About the author
Stuart Hall
192Ìýbooks371ÌýfollowersStuart Hall was an influential Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He was Professor of Sociology at the Open University, the founding editor of New Left Review, and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
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September 4, 2024no tak toto bolo pre mna ozaj trapenie lebo ja som total vypadla zo svungu semiotickych terminov ale reku pome dalej
March 29, 2022
Read this for an essay I've been procrastinating for a while and thought it might help. It does not, so I guess reading this was just more procrastinating. I'm glad I read it anyways--always wanted to start with Stuart Hall.
Not exactly familiar with the semiotics field or sort of cultural studies that Hall is speaking to, but the vocabulary is easy enough to grasp for a layman. In my understanding, this is basically an Marxist (specifically Gramsci and Althusser-inspired) analysis of mass communications, particularly in regards to television. Unfortunately, I am an uncultured zoomer hack who doesn't really watch TV or any sort of aural-visual media that much unless it's on the streaming services that I leech off my siblings from. Not that this really matters, so not sure why I brought it up. Anyways, what I understood was that Hall is talking about how meaning is signified through multiple determinate moments in the process of production of a particular program to its reception by an audience. Hall argues against behaviorism in mass media research, which seems to espouse a crude positivism. For example, Hall brings up that "violence" in media is often seen as signifying in isolation from other bracketing elements and conventions, and what is signified is wrongly seen as fixed and unalterable.
Rather, the transmission from producer from receiver is much more complex and not a simple linear process. Of course, there is the socio-political web of codes, meanings, and culture that producers and receivers are a part of and participate in, such that producers obviously are often receivers and vice versa. Hall is writing in the 70s but this point seems extremely prescient in the age of fandom, memes, and online communities. Of course, while moments of the totality (the mass communication apparatus in this instance) retain their "relative autonomy," the production process is "predominant" in that it is the point of departure for the message. From here, the social relations (structures) of production pass into the formal codes and languages of discourse, and are encoded into a "meaningful" message as the program. At another determinate moment, the message is decoded into structures of audience reception and use--the interesting thing is that, of course, this isn't a fixed process. However, hegemonic codes (and codes that contest this hegemony) shape the way this process ebbs and flows. Cool stuff.
Not exactly familiar with the semiotics field or sort of cultural studies that Hall is speaking to, but the vocabulary is easy enough to grasp for a layman. In my understanding, this is basically an Marxist (specifically Gramsci and Althusser-inspired) analysis of mass communications, particularly in regards to television. Unfortunately, I am an uncultured zoomer hack who doesn't really watch TV or any sort of aural-visual media that much unless it's on the streaming services that I leech off my siblings from. Not that this really matters, so not sure why I brought it up. Anyways, what I understood was that Hall is talking about how meaning is signified through multiple determinate moments in the process of production of a particular program to its reception by an audience. Hall argues against behaviorism in mass media research, which seems to espouse a crude positivism. For example, Hall brings up that "violence" in media is often seen as signifying in isolation from other bracketing elements and conventions, and what is signified is wrongly seen as fixed and unalterable.
Rather, the transmission from producer from receiver is much more complex and not a simple linear process. Of course, there is the socio-political web of codes, meanings, and culture that producers and receivers are a part of and participate in, such that producers obviously are often receivers and vice versa. Hall is writing in the 70s but this point seems extremely prescient in the age of fandom, memes, and online communities. Of course, while moments of the totality (the mass communication apparatus in this instance) retain their "relative autonomy," the production process is "predominant" in that it is the point of departure for the message. From here, the social relations (structures) of production pass into the formal codes and languages of discourse, and are encoded into a "meaningful" message as the program. At another determinate moment, the message is decoded into structures of audience reception and use--the interesting thing is that, of course, this isn't a fixed process. However, hegemonic codes (and codes that contest this hegemony) shape the way this process ebbs and flows. Cool stuff.
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December 16, 2021im not sure i read the whole thing but a lot of readings i DID do for this class aren't on goodreads so im taking some type of credit here
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November 8, 2013124569
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