Audience: Stuart Hall

Encoding and Decoding

"The function of criticism should be to show how it is what is is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."

Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and professor of sociology. He said there are 3 ways we read a media text (how the audience respond) These 3 are:

Dominant reading

The reader fully accepts the preferred reading. The audience read the media the way that the producer intended them to.

Negotiated reading

The reader partially believes the code. However they sometimes modify it in a way which reflects their position, experiences and interests.

Oppositional reading

The reader's social position places them in an oppositional relation to the code. They reject the media.

Media Power

Media power is how media creates dominant ideologies. These include things like the role of women, asylum and immigration, welfare system, monarchy etc. Mass media creates and defines issues of public concern and interest through audience positioning. A key word is polysemy. (poly meaning multiple). This word means that a text has multiple meaning and how people interpret and decode readings in different contexts and cultures.

Encoding - is the process in which a text is produced and is then made into a particular format

Decoding - is how the message is received and how it is interpreted.

Relating to music video

Whenever a music video is produced and made, it automatically falls under the process of encoding because it had already been put into a format that is ready to be received by an audience.

Decoding in music video will be the audience receiving and evaluating the music video. The audiences will interpret the encoded message in different ways, some will receive it as intended and some will interpret a different meaning to the way the producers intended the meaning to be. This can be perceived as a problem however as the product can be perceived in the wrong way and the true meaning of the video can be lost. This can cause issues when it comes to reviewing the videos success.