Stuart Hall (1973) ‘Encoding and Decoding’

Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding and Decoding’ (1973) expressed a view of audience meaning-making that broke with various forms of linear determinism in which media producers were considered to control audience interpretations through media texts. Instead, Hall considered reception of media communication to be an unfinished battle in which users can take on different positions and do not necessarily have to follow the reading of media texts intended by the producers. This laid the foundation for critical studies of the complex and powerful ideological processes of the media. Hall’s blending of different approaches into a balanced whole was also characteristic of cultural studies, with its shifting combinations of semiotics, structuralism, discourse analysis and political economy. On closer inspection, the seemingly simple model points out important yet complicated questions about the interplay between media, power and meaning.