Encoding/Decoding

In 1973 Stuart Hall presented a paper that reorganized the study of communication by demolishing its most basic assumption. The assumption was that a message carries a fixed meaning from sender to receiver, and that communication succeeds when the receiver gets the meaning the sender put in. Hall argued that this picture is not merely incomplete but ideologically loaded, because it hides the labor and the power involved at every stage. A message has to be encoded—put into form, into code, into a set of conventions—and that encoding happens under specific institutional conditions, by people occupying specific positions, serving specific interests they may not even be aware of. The message then has to be decoded by a receiver who brings entirely different conditions to the act, and who may read it as intended, read it partly against the grain, or refuse its terms altogether. Between encoding and decoding there is no guarantee of