Sunday, 17 January 2021

STUART HALL | ENCODING DECODING | CIRCUIT OF CULTURE

 ENCODING AND DECODING – STUART HALL



The Encoding/decoding model of communication was first developed by cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall in 1973. Titled 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse', Hall's essay offers a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, disseminated, and interpreted. Hall proposed 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.

This simply means, encoding/decoding is the translation of a message that is easily understood. When you decode a message, you extract the meaning of that message in ways that make sense to you. Decoding has both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication: Decoding behavior without using words means observing body language and its associated emotions. For example, some body language signs for when someone is upset, angry, or stressed would be a use of excessive hand/arm movements, red in the face, crying, and even sometimes silence. Sometimes when someone is trying to get a message across to someone, the message can be interpreted differently from person to person. Decoding is all about the understanding of what someone already knows, based on the information given throughout the message being received. Whether there is a large audience or exchanging a message to one person, decoding is the process of obtaining, absorbing, understanding, and sometimes using the information that was given throughout a verbal or non-verbal message.

In the essay ‘Encoding and Decoding…; Stuart Hall explain that certain cultural codes are so widely circulated and integrated in to the main stream media that they can be seen as ‘naturalized’. These codes are most likely to be received in ways which closely resemble the meanings put forward by the encoder. He says that majority of people decode culture meanings by producing ‘negotiated’ readings which are a product of their own experiences and local culture.

 

CIRCUIT OF CULTURE – STUART HALL

Stuart Hall and Hoggart founded the University of Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1963-64. They developed a variety fo critical approaches for analysis, interpretation and criticism of Cultural Studies. They focused on the interplay of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. They were among the first to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, films, and other popular cultural forms on audiences. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture in different ways.

In his research work, Stuart Hall has analyzed culture as a continuous circuit that is made up of ‘production – distribution – production’. According to him, we need to analyze how media audiences produce messages, how they circulate the messages, and how the audiences use or decode the messages to create meaning.

He analyzed the products and institutions of corporate culture with study of Sony Walkman. The launch of the Walkman by Sony was very carefully timed to coincide with the school holidays as it was mostly targeted towards the youth. Also production was done keeping in mind a reasonably priced product. Thus it was not very high priced and was marketed and advertised from this point of view. Mobile urban youth were represented using the product. Thus the product was linked to its target audience and enabled them to identify with it.

As seen in the above example, culture became a description of a particular way of life. It expressed certain meanings and values. there is a continuous process of cultural encoding and distribution. The way culture is produced, circulated and decoded by the audience is controlled by advertising, marketing and design. Through Circuit of Culture, we can study and analyze the meaning of cultural artefacts. It is important for us to focus on the representation of things as this affects our understanding of them and how they get shared with others.

Thus, we can see how media culture studies help us grasp the ways in which media culture is produced, circulated and distributed.

 


 

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