Decoding

Many decades after Josephine Baker, a cultural theorist named Stuart Hall wrote about encoding and decoding in a way that upended communication studies. Hall was a Jamaican scholar who lived and worked in England, where he was instrumental in the rise of cultural studies. Along with other cultural studies scholars, Hall showed us that audiences were not just objects to be engaged, entertained, or manipulated – they were real people worth talking to, worth watching and interviewing and studying for the various unique ways they received messages, reworked meaning, and embedded communication practices in their everyday lives.

In his 1973 article “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse”, Hall proposed that when messages are made, they are encoded with meaning. In this encoding process, there is an attempt to fix meaning and to limit the ways that audiences might respond to the message. However, as audiences we interpret messages differently depending on our identity, our life experiences, our social and cultural contexts – and so when messages are received, they are decoded. And at this decoding stage, audiences adopt different reading positions: they might agree with the intended meaning of the message, but they might also oppose, contest, rework, or negotiate it.

Hall’s model, proposed within the context of broadcast television but applicable to a range of communication practices even today, was an important step in recognising that neither audiences nor communicators hold all the power. Audiences are active producers of meaning, but they don’t read messages in any which way. Instead, meaning is a process of negotiation and sometimes of struggle between texts, audiences, and communicators.

This has implications for how we see the effects of communication, which we’ll discuss in a later chapter. As Hall puts it, a message isn’t just a tap on the kneecap, something that provokes a simple and singular response. If audiences interpret messages in such multiple ways, and sometimes reject them altogether, then the effects of communication – if there are any – become very complex and themselves multiple.

Photo by Anton Maksimov 5642.su on Unsplash

“The Dress”

In 2015, one year after Hall’s death, we were treated to a spectacular reminder of the idea that meaning does not reside in a message, but is actively created by the audience. “The Dress” was a piece of viral media – a photograph of a dress taken at a wedding in Scotland and shared via a Tumblr post. This photographic image captured our collective imagination and was rapidly shared online for the simple reason that viewers could not agree on its colour: some believed the dress was blue and black, others saw white and gold.

Years later, the science behind this viral phenomenon was explained. According to neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch (2017) in a theory published in the Journal of Vision, our perception of colour is related to how we perceive the effects of lighting: when lighting conditions can’t be fully determined, the brain makes assumptions and fills in the gaps. Whether we saw the dress as black and blue or white and gold was dependent upon the brain’s assumption that the photograph was taken in light or shadow, indoors or outdoors, in daylight or at night.

At the time of the photograph’s propulsion into viral stardom, though, what made viewers gasp and promptly share the image was the way it shook our perception of the ‘truth’ of colour. Surely, we told ourselves, colour is already in an image – we as viewers or audiences don’t create it. Nevertheless, we could stand side-by-side with a friend, family member, colleague, or neighbour, looking at the same photograph, and perceive or interpret it in different ways.

Best remembered as a viral phenomenon that once “broke the Internet”, then, The Dress is also a beautiful reminder that humans usually (and mistakenly) assume that others see the world in the same way as them. And perhaps most pertinently, while the decoding of the colours sparked global attention at the time, the image has since been swept up in various remix practices and actively decoded to produce new meanings (which you can explore on the Know Your Meme entry for ‘What colour is this dress?’).

This example shows us decoding in action. You can probably think of other, similar examples (many of my past students have mentioned the sonic meme Yanny/Laurel).

“Yanny or Laurel: who heard it best?”, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age

What such examples remind us is that we need to understand how decoding works in digital and networked contexts. Just as Baker urged conversationalists to be attentive listeners, today’s communicators must attend to the needs, experiences, and behaviours of audiences dispersed across digital platforms. We may be experts at encoding a message to maximum effect, but arguably, such skill means little if we don’t understand how decoding works and therefore can’t imagine or predict how people will respond.

Decoding in digital contexts

Much fascinating research in the field of communication studies is today concerned with new practices of decoding and new iterations of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model. Adrienne Shaw (2017) gives the example of “modding”: the practice of creating modifications to digital games. Modding, Shaw argues, can be understood through the lens of Hall’s model as a resistant reading of a game – a practice through which meaning is actively (re)created by the player.

Elsewhere, in her research on teenagers and their media use, danah boyd points out that knowledge of encoding and decoding practices allows young people to gain agency in virtual environments that do not otherwise afford them much power. The teenagers in boyd’s study encoded their social media messages in particular, strategic ways, understanding that their intended audience would have the cultural knowledge to decode the message, while others would not, and thereby protecting their privacy even in a public virtual space (boyd 2014: 68).

We also need to acknowledge that the boundaries between encoding and decoding have been shaken in the decades since Hall proposed his model. Both modders and social media users are examples of what media theorist Axel Bruns terms “produsers” (2008) – people who both produce and consume media content. The term “produser” captures the hybrid position audiences occupy in age of networked and digital communication.

I can’t help but wonder what Josephine Baker would have thought of this term “produser”. In a conversation – especially an “artful” one – the participants occupy produser roles, in the sense that they are both producing and consuming the “content” or “products” of the conversation; when Baker instructs us to “be a good listener”, she is acknowledging the interchange of roles in a conversation, and it is interesting that this interchange – which was obscured in the so-called broadcast model of communication, whereby information simply travels in one direction from sender to receiver – has resurfaced in the digital age.

Consider, for example, the concept of social listening, which has emerged as an important research tool for communicators. Social listening is the analysis of communication patterns and trends to develop knowledge that will benefit a particular brand, client, or stakeholder. This knowledge helps communicators better know their audience. The term listening is used figuratively here, as though the researchers could physically visit the halls and parlours of online communication and silently participate in the conversations as they unfold. Nevertheless, the use of the term “listening” (which recalls Baker’s eighth golden rule) acknowledges that audiences are communicators themselves whose interactions are worth attending to.

Stuart Hall is recognised as a key thinker in communication studies, while Josephine Baker was not a scholar and is not widely known in the discipline today, even though her book experienced remarkable longevity. So what do Baker and Hall have in common? Their writings about communication centralise the audience. To a certain extent, both were concerned with “decoding”. However, Baker’s primary concern was how the communicator might strategically guide the audience’s (or listener’s) response in order to enhance their prowess as a conversationalist – she was interested in the audience as an object to be activated, engaged, and retained. Hall, in turn, was interested in power, interpretation, and the acts of resistance that lead to misunderstanding and/or the production of (new) meaning. Interestingly, both perspectives have currency in the digital age.