Encoding/DecodingStuart Hall

The meaning of the text is located between its producer and the reader. The producer (encoder) framed (or encoded) meaning in a certain way, while the reader (decoder) decodes it differently according to his/her personal background, the various different social situations and frames of interpretation

Phases in the model are referred to as “moments”

Hall himself referred to several 'linked but distinctive moments - production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction' (Hall 1980, 128) as part of the 'circuit of communication'

It is how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed, proposing a new theory of communication

He argued that – the meaning is not fixed/determined by the sender, the message is never transparent and the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning.

There is a “lack of fit” between the moment of the production of the message ('encoding') and the moment of its reception ('decoding').

Hall suggested 3 hypothetical interpretative codes for the reader of the text.

1. Dominant Reading (agrees with the text)2. Negotiated Reading (partly agrees)3. Oppositional Reading (disagrees)

Gramsci’s concept of Hegeomony. Power and meaning are intertwined. We

are not just dumb readers but choose to read the encoded messages.