A CRITICAL REVIEW OF STUART HALL’S ENCODING AND DECODING

INTRODUCTION

Stuart Hall is one of the prominent scholars of the British Cultural Studies also known as the
Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. He was one of the early proponents of the audience
reception theory and developed encoding/decoding model as an approach to textual analysis,
with focus on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. Hall
believes that the audience does not simply passively accept a text; rather they produce
personalized meanings out of it.
The encoding and decoding model was developed by Hall in an attempt to challenge the
long-held assumptions on how media messages are produced, circulated, and consumed. Hall
argued that researchers should direct their attention toward (1) analysis of the social and
political context in which content is produced (encoding), and (2) the consumption of media
content (decoding). Researchers should not make unwarranted assumptions about either
encoding or decoding, but instead should conduct research permitting them to carefully
assess the social and political context in which media content is produced and the everyday
life context in which it is consumed (Mcquail, 2010).
In contrast to other media theories that disempowered audiences, Hall advanced the idea that
audience members can play an active role in decoding messages as they rely on their
own social contexts, and might be capable of changing messages themselves
through collective action. In simpler terms, Encoding/decoding is the translation of a message
that is easily understood. When you decode a message, you are extracting the meaning of that
message into terms that you are able to easily understand. Decoding has both verbal and non-
verbal forms through communication. Decoding behavior without using words would be
observing body language (Hall, Durham and Kellner, 2001).
Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model of communication basically explains that meaning is
encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver and that these encoded meanings may be
decoded to mean something else. That is to say, the senders encode meaning in their
messages according to their ideals and views and the messages are decoded by the receivers
according to their own ideals and views, which may lead to miscommunication or to the
receiver understanding something very different from what the sender intended (Hall, 1993).

Encoding/Decoding as Propounded by Stuart Hall

Hall, in his essay criticized the traditional model of communication for its linearity-
sender/message/receiver and for its concentration on the level of message exchange, absence
of structured conception of the different moments as a complex structure of relations. He then
postulated that the process of communication may be more complex than the idea in the
traditional model when all the elements or structures of communication are taken into
account. He therefore came up with a four-stage model of communication which includes the
production, circulation, distribution/consumption and reproduction. He sees each of these
steps as both autonomous and interdependent.

Hall further compared the model with the homologous approach that forms the structure of
commodity production found in Karl Mark’s capitalism and says it has an added advantage of
bringing out more sharply how a continuous circuit – production – distribution – reproduction
can be sustained through a passage of forms. He explains that the approach in Karl Marx’s
capitalism highlights the specificity of forms in which the product of the process appears in
each moment thereby distinguishing ‘discursive’ production from other types of production
in the society as well as in modern media systems. These four stages in Hall (1980) model
are explained thus;

Production – This is where the encoding or the construction of a message begins. Production
process has its own "discursive" aspect, as it is also framed by meanings and ideas; by
drawing upon society's dominant ideologies, the creator of the message is feeding off
society's beliefs, and values. Numerous factors are involved in the production process. On
one hand "knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, technical skills,
professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions
about the audience form the "production structures of the television. On the other hand,
topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, definitions of the
situation' from other sources and other discursive formations form the other part of wider
socio-cultural and political structure.

Circulation – This has to do with how individuals perceive things; visual vs. written. How
things are circulated influences how audience members will receive the message and put it to
use. According to Philip Elliott the audience is both the "source" and the "receiver" of the
television message. For example, circulation and reception of a media message are
incorporated in the production process through numerous "feedbacks." So circulation and
perception, although not identical, are certainly related to and involved in the production
process.

Use (distribution or consumption) – For a message to be successfully "realized", "the

broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of a meaningful discourse.
This means that the message has to be adopted as a meaningful discourse and it has to be
meaningfully decoded. However, the decoding/interpreting of a message requires active
recipients.

Reproduction – This stage is directly after audience members have interpreted a message in
their own way based on their experiences and beliefs. The decoded meanings are the ones
with "an effect" (e.g. influence, instruct, entertain) with "very complex perceptual, cognitive,
emotional, ideological or behavioral consequences. What is done with the message after it
has been interpreted is where this stage comes in. At this point, you will see whether
individuals take action after they have been exposed to a specific message.

According to the author, Meanings and messages in the discursive production are organized
through the operation of codes within the rules of language or any form of communication.
Each stage will affect the message (or product) being conveyed as a result of its 'discursive
form' (e.g. practices, instruments, relations). Therefore, once the discourse is accomplished, it
must be translated into social practices in order to be completed and effective – “If no
'meaning' is taken, there can be no 'consumption'." Each of these steps helps defines the one
that follows, while remaining clearly distinct (Hall, 1980). Thus, even though each of these
moments (stages) is equally important to the process as a whole, they do not completely
ensure that the following moment will necessary happen. Each can constitute its own break or
interruption of the 'passage of forms' on whose continuity the flow of effective production
(i.e. reproduction) depends.

Since discursive form plays such an important role in a communicative process, Hall suggests
that "encoding" and "decoding" are "determinate moments. What he means by that is that an
event, for example, cannot be transmitted in its "raw format." A person would have to be
physically at the place of the event to see it in such format. Rather, he states that events can
only be transported to the audience in the audio-visual forms of televisual discourse (that is,
the message goes to processes of production and distribution). This is when the other
determinant moment begins – decoding, or interpretation of the images and messages through
a wider social, cultural, and political cognitive spectrum (that is, the processes of
consumption and reproduction). The event must become a 'story' before it can become a
communicative event.

In trying to characterize television communicative process, he said that the institutional

structures of broadcasting, with their practices and networks of production, their organized
relations and technical infrastructure, are required to produce a programme. Production, here,
constructs the message. In one sense, then, the circuit begins here. Of course, the production
process is not without its 'discursive' aspect: it, too, is frarned throughout by meanings and
ideas: knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, historically defined technical
skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions,
assumptions about the audience and so on frame the constitution of the programme through
this production structure. Further he maintains that, though the production structures of
television originate the television discourse, they do not constitute a dosed system. They draw
topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, 'definitions of the
situation from other sources and other discursive formations within the wider socio-cultural
and political structure of which they are a differentiated part. This he said has been expressed
succinctly by Philip Elliott within a more traditional framework, in his discussion of the way
in which the audience is both the 'source' and the 'receiver' of the television message

Borrowing from Marx's terms, Hall said that circulation and reception are, indeed, 'moments'
of the production process in television and are reincorporated through a number of skewed
and structured 'feedbacks', into the production process itself. The consumption or reception of
the television message is thus also itself a 'moment' of the production process in its larger
sense, though the latter is 'predominant' because it is the 'point of departure for the realization'
of the message. Production and reception of the television message are not, therefore,
identical, but they are related: they are differentiated moments within the totality formed by
the social relations of the communicative process as a whole.

He noted that the broadcasting structures must yield to encoded messages in the form of a
meaningful discourse at a certain point thereby making the institution-societal relations of
production to pass under the discursive rules of language for its product to be realized. This
he said initiates a further differentiated moment, in which the formal rules of discourse and
language are in dominance. “Before this message can have an 'effect (however defined),
satisfy a 'need' or be put to a 'use', it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and
be meaningfully decoded, he said. It is this set of decoded meanings which 'have an effect',
influence, entertain, instruct or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional,
ideological or behavioural consequences. In a 'determinate' moment the structure employs a
code and yields a 'message': at another determinate moment the 'message', via its decoding,
issues into the structure of social practices. We are now fully aware that this reentry into the
practices of audience reception and 'use' cannot be understood in simple behavioural terms.
The typical processes identified in positivistic research on isolated elements - effects, uses,
'gratifications' - are themselves framed by structures of understanding, as well as being
produced by social and economic relations, which shape their 'realizationi at the reception
end of the chain and which permit the meanings signified in the discourse to be transposed
into practice or consciousness (to acquire social use value or political effectivity).
Referring to the diagram representing the circuit in the communication model, Hall stressed
that there may be difference between the intended meaning and the interpreted meaning of
the message in question as the codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly
symmetrical and that the degrees of 'understanding' and 'misunderstanding' in the
communicative exchange - depend on the degrees of symmetry/asyrrrmetry; meaning the
relations of equivalence established between the positions of the 'personifications', encoder-
producer and decoder-receiver. He however stated that the situation in turn depends on the
degrees of identity/non-identity between the codes which perfectly or imperfectly transmit,
interrupt or systematically distorts what has been transmitted.

He contends that the “lack of fit between the codes” has much to do with the “structural
differences of relation and position between broadcasters and audiences” as well as the
“asymmetry between the codes of 'source' and 'receiver' at the moment of transformation into
and out of the discursive form”. The so-called “'distortions' or 'misunderstandings' arise
precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange,
he said.

Hall also argued that there is some ground for thinking that a new and exciting phase in so-
called audience research, of a quite new kind, may be opening up. He said that at either end
of the communicative chain the use of the semiotic paradigm promises to dispel the lingering
behaviourism which has dogged mass-media research for so long, especially in its approach
to content. This he said is the feeling despite the fact that television programme is not a
behavioural input, like a tap on the knee cap, yet it seems to have been almost impossible for
traditional researchers to conceptualize the corrmunicative process without lapsing into one
or other variant of low flying behaviourism. He therefore cited Gerbner’s study on Television
violence in which he remarked that representations of violence on the TV screen 'are not
violence but messages about violence': but scholars have continued to research the question
of violence, as if they were unable to comprehend this epistemological distinction.

Based on this, he postulates that the televisual sign is a complex one. It is usually constituted
by the combination of two types of discourse, visual and aural. Moreover, it is an iconic sign,
in Peirce's terminology, because 'it possesses some of the properties of the thing represented
which is a point which has led to a great deal of confusion and has provided the site of
intense controversy in the study of visual language. Because of this, he said that since the
visual discourse translates a three-dimensional world into two-dimensional planes, it cannot
of course be the referent or concept it signifies. He pointed out that some codes are widely
distributed in a community or culture and for that they can be learned at early age.

While trying to clarify the confusion in current linguistic theory, Hall zeroes in on the
distinction between connotation and denotation. He equated denotation with literal meaning
of a sign while referring to connotation as less fixed and therefore more conventionalized and
changeable, associative meanings, which clearly vary from instance to instance and therefore,
must depend on the intervention of code. He further stressed on the importance of
differentiating between denotation and connotation, warning that denotative or 'literal'
meaning is not “outside ideology rather, its “ideological value is strongly fixed - because it
has become so fully universal and 'natural. He equally explained that the level of connotation
of visual sign is the point where “already coded signs intersect with the deep semantic codes
of a culture and take on additional, more active ideological dimensions.

To further explain how misunderstandings come about in all kinds of literal works, Hall came
up with three “hypothetical positions from which decodings of a televisual discourse may be
constructed”. They are;
Dominant/Hegemonic Position – This position which hall describes as the typical case of
perfectly transparent communication is when the audience takes the connoted meaning of
communication, like in a television newscast or a current affair program full and straight, and
decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded. He went
further to say that the dominant position is hegemonic because they represent the definition of
situations or events which are in dominance.
Negotiated Position – this position Hall says 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. What this means is that people
may understand the dominant position and believe the position, but are in a situation where
they must make up their own separate rules to coexist with the dominant position.
Oppositional Position – this happens when the viewer perfectly understands both the literal
and the connotative inflection given by a discourse but to decode the message in a globally
contrary way. Hall explains that this kind of position happens mainly in political moments
like during crisis period when events which are normally signified and decoded in a
negotiated way begin to be given an oppositional reading.

Putting the Model to Practice

In a special report I did on the recent ban on provision of conference materials and souvenirs
in government functions by the federal government, I interviewed a cross section of
respondents likely to be affected by the policy in Enugu metropolis. The rationale behind the
ban as clearly stated in the directive is that the nation is facing serious economic challenges,
therefore there is need to cut down on government’s spending as well as minimize wastages.
This rationale supposedly represents the dominant position in the country which was what the
encoders of that policy had at the back of their minds before dissemination.

It was a ‘vox pop’ and four categories of people where interviewed; Mid-level Civil servants,
Dealers on Souvenirs and Conference Materials, Labour Leaders and Public Affairs Analysts.
Their responses showed that the civil servants and dealers on the materials decoded the
message in a contrary way (oppositional position). The civil servants said it was a bad policy
which will affect learning and capacity development. The dealers viewed the policy with
suspicion. They believe that conference materials are essentials in training and the policy if
strictly implemented will affect their businesses.
The labour leaders decoded the message from a negotiated position. Despite acknowledging
that the nation is facing financial difficulties, they said the policy will be x-rayed by the body
to see if it has effect on workers and if so, they will approach the government for reversal.

On the other hand, most public affairs analysts hailed the policy as a right step in the right
direction, considering the economic situation in the country. They interpreted the message
from the dominant/hegemonic position which was the intended and expected impact of the
message.

What other Scholars said about Encoding/Decoding

Despite providing an insight into audience reception research, Hall’s encoding and decoding
model has faced criticism from other scholars. While some criticized the model for basing its
framework on assumption that the latent meaning is encoded in a dominant position, others
raised a question of how a 'preferred reading' can be established. One of such critics, Shaun
Moores raised the following questions about the model, “Where is it and how do we know if
we've found it? Can we be sure we didn't put it there ourselves while we were looking? And
can it be found by examining any sort of text?” (Moores, 1993).
A student and colleague of Hall who applied Hall’s insight in his studies, David Morley also
wondered whether it might be the 'reading which the analyst is predicting that most members
of the audience will produce' (Morley, 1981). Morley also discusses the problem of
understanding the concept of ‘oppositional reading, noting that there might be confusion
between referring ‘oppositional reading' to rejecting the preferred meaning (dominant
ideology) and to disagreement with the text. He argued that the study has some unsolved
problems (Morley, 2006).
He therefore suggests 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 while evaluation is how readers relate the text to the ideological position (Schroder,
2000)

Ross (2011) while suggesting ways that Hall's typology of the Encoding/Decoding Model can
be modified, came up with a more complex typology consisting of nine combinations of
encoding and decoding positions. The expanded version he explained does not imply
replacing the original model but rather to let the model work in a new way. He also concurs
with David Morley that the model has some unsolved problems.
John Corner is equally of the view that it is not easy to find actual examples of media texts in
which one reading is preferred within a plurality of possible readings (Corner, 1983) while
Justin Wren-Lewis says that 'the fact that many decoders will come up with the same reading
does not make that meaning an essential part of the text' (Wren-Lewis 1983).

Another scholar, Kathy Myers notes that in the spirit of a post-structuralist social semiotics,
that 'it can be misleading to search for the determinations of a preferred reading solely within
the form and structure' of the text (Myers, 1983). She adds that in the context of advertising,
there is a danger in the analysis of advertising by assuming that it is in the interests of
advertisers to create one 'preferred' reading of the advertisement's message. Intentionality
suggests conscious manipulation and organization of texts and images, and implies that the
visual, technical and linguistic strategies work together to secure one preferred reading of an
advertisement to the exclusion of others, she said. She further states that the openness of
connotative codes may mean that we have to replace the notion of 'preferred reading' with
another which admits a range of possible alternatives open to the audience (Myers, 1983).

Despite the criticism, many scholars and theorists have however applied Hall’s
encoding/decoding model in their studies especially in areas of cultural studies and audience
reception. Popular among them is David Morley who employed it in his studies of how
different social groups interpreted a television programme (Morley 1980).

Also Jonathan Potter, cited in Grayson (1998) is part of the symbolic capital of members of
the relevant 'interpretative community' and constitutes the textual and interpretative codes
available to them which offer them the potential to understand and sometimes also to produce
texts which employ them. David Mick also applied it in his research in the field of
advertising (Mick & Politi, 1989)
Fiske (1987) also supports the view of Hall that audiences are not merely passive watchers of
the television screen, but rather are active audiences, engaging with the program in ways the
producers never could imagine. It is through actions, such as fan fiction, fan videos, fan
communities, and active campaigning for change on screen that audiences not only absorb the
meaning of the text in question, but actively engage with it (Fiske, 1987). Fiske made this
remark while discussing the popularity of Dynasty in the late 1980s; a show so popular that
there would often be parties where people would have dinner and then watch Dynasty
together.
Radway (1984) applied the model in her feminist reception study of popular romance novels
in which she found that Romance readers rejected the preferred reading and instead engaged
in negotiated or oppositional decoding. Thus romance reading could be interpreted as a form
of passive resistance against male-dominated culture. Similar interpretations were offered by
British research on viewers of soap operas on their decoding of program content (Brunsdon
and Morley, 1981; Hobson, 1982; Lovell, 1981).

CONCLUSION
Having critically examined Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding study and the views of other
scholars about the model, I wish to state that the work has more merits than shortcomings. It
challenges the predominant methodologies of empirical social scientific audience research
and also the humanistic studies of contents because both fail to take account of the ‘power of
the audience ‘in giving meaning to messages ( Baran and Davies, 2010).
Most audience studies at the time Hall developed this model seem to focus on the effect the
media have on the audience. Most researchers applied quantitative approach to such studies.
However, Hall’s encoding/decoding model brought a new approach to audience studies by
using qualitative strategies to probe into how audiences read and interpret media contents.
This not only proves that mass media audiences are active audience but are group of people
who are media literates and capable of making meaning out of media contents according to
their predispositions, ideologies and preferences.
The model is also a contribution to limited media effect studies except that it took a different
direction to the study by empowering the audiences, making them appear as the determinant
of effects and not necessarily the mass media. It is equally an eye opener to media planners,
content producers and advertisers who traditionally believes that their media contents will
always bring about intended, expected effect on the audience. Hall has proved that these
effects all depend on the position from which the audiences decide to decode the encoded
messages. This explains why most adverts, political campaigns and behavior change
campaigns fail to yield the anticipated results and sometimes work in the oppositional
direction.