One of the key issues in audience studies concerns the relationship between producer, text and audience. In many ways this equation is about a balance of power: assessing the extent to which audiences are influenced and swayed by media texts, and to what extent they appropriate them in ways quite different to the producers’ intentions.
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M E D I A S T U D I E S : T H E E S S E N T I A L R E S O U R C E encodingmeaning structures 1
decoding
meaning structures 2 programme as
‘meaningful’ discourse
frameworks of knowledge relations of production technical infrastructure
frameworks of knowledge relations of production technical infrastructure
E x t r a c t 22 9
Source: S. Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in S. Hall et al. (eds), Culture, Media, Language, Hutchinson, 1980, p. 130
One of the earliest explorations of this relationship comes in Stuart Hall’s Encoding/
Decoding model. In the diagram reproduced above, he represents the two sides: encoding, which is the domain of the producer, and decoding, the domain of the audience. The process of communicating a message requires that it be encoded in such a way that the receiver of the message is able to decode it. For example, a televisual message is encoded through the use of camera technology, transmitted as a signal and then decoded using a television set. If you do not have a television set, then you don’t have the means to understand or decode the televisual message.
Examine the symmetry between the two sides in the diagram above. Both encoding and decoding take place within the similar contexts, which ultimately provide the means by which the message can be transmitted and received. One reason that the encoded and decoded messages may not be the same is the capacity of the audience to vary its response to media messages. Hall identified three possible types of response that an audience might make to a media message, as Bell, Joyce and Rivers also point out in the extract below.
One concept that has been challenged subsequently by theorists is the notion of Hall’s
‘preferred reading’. This refers to the way the encoder would prefer the audience to interpret a media message, above all other possible readings. However, it could be argued that some texts are deliberately created to remain open to interpretation. The films of David Lynch, such as Lost Highwayor Mulholland Drive, are examples of texts that deliberately leave it up to the audience to make their own individual readings.
A theorist who developed the ideas behind Hall’s Encoding and Decoding model was John Fiske. He explained the distinction between the two sides of the model as an opposition
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The encoding/decoding model put forward by Stuart Hall and David Morley centred on the idea that audiences vary in their response to media messages.
This is because they are influenced by their social position, gender, age, ethnicity, occupation, experience and beliefs as well as where they are and what they are doing when they receive a message. In this model, media texts are seen to be encoded in such a way as to present a preferred reading to the audience but the audience does not necessarily accept that preferred reading. Hall categorised three kinds of audience response.
■ Dominant – the audience agree with the dominant values expressed within the preferred reading of the text
■ Negotiated – the audience generally agree with the dominant values expressed within the preferred reading but they may disagree with certain aspects according to their social background
■ Oppositional – the audience disagree with dominant values expressed within the preferred reading of the text
A. Bell, M. Joyce and D. Rivers, Advanced Media Studies, Hodder & Stoughton, 1999, p. 21
between the ‘power bloc’ of a dominant cultural, political and social order and ‘the people’.
The power bloc produces mass products that the people change by their resistance to them.
As Nick Stevenson explains in his essay, ‘Critical Perspectives with Audience Research’:
‘popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the cultural industry’.
From this perspective, the audience is empowered in a way that might not be readily observed. Stevenson goes on to cite Fiske’s use of Madonna’s music to exemplify the way in which ‘the act of consumption always entails the production of meaning’.
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M E D I A S T U D I E S : T H E E S S E N T I A L R E S O U R C EThe circulation of meaning requires us to study three levels of textuality while teasing out the specific relations between them. First there are the cultural forms that are produced along with the new Madonna album to create the idea of a media event. These can include concerts, books, posters and videos. At the next level, there is a variety of media talk in popular magazines and newspapers, television pop programmes and radio shows all offering a variety of critical commentary upon Madonna. The final level of textuality, the one that Fiske claims to be most attentive to, involves the ways in which Madonna becomes part of our everyday life. According to Fiske, Madonna’s career was launched by a rock video of an early song ‘Lucky Star’. She became established in 1985 as a cultural icon through a series of successful LPs and singles, the film Desperately Seeking Susan, nude shots that appeared in Penthouse and Playboy, as well as the successful marketing of a certain ‘look’. Fiske argues that Madonna symbolically plays with traditional male-dominated stereotypes of the virgin and the whore in order to subtly subvert patriarchal meanings. That is, the textuality of Madonna ideologically destabilises traditional representations of women. Fiske accounts for Madonna’s success by arguing that she is an open or writerly text rather than a closed readerly one. In this way, Madonna is able to challenge her fans to reinvent their own sexual identities out of the cultural resources that she and patriarchal capitalism provides. Hence Madonna as a text is polysemic, patriar-chal and sceptical. In the final analysis, Madonna is not popular because she is promoted by the culture industry, but because her attempts to forge her own identity within a male-defined culture have a certain relevance for her fans.
N. Stevenson, ‘Critical Perspectives within Audience Research’ in T. O’Sullivan and Y. Jewkes (eds), The Media Studies Reader, Arnold, 1997, p. 235
Choose a more up-to-date example of a product of mass culture that you think has been appropriated by people as ‘a cultural resource’. Explain how you think that audiences may have used it differently from the way the producers intended.