[1] As the jargon of Shannon's information theory moved into semiotics, notably through the work of thinkers Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco, who in the course of the 1960s began to put more emphasis on the social and political aspects of encoding.
There are many examples, including observing body language and its associated emotions, e.g. monitoring signs when someone is upset, angry, or stressed where they use excessive hand/arm movements, crying, and even silence.
[4] "The level of connotation of the visual sign, of its contextual reference and positioning in different discursive fields of meaning and association, is the point where already coded signs intersect with the deep semantic codes of a culture and take on additional more active ideological dimensions.
It is a system of coded meanings, and in order to create that, the sender needs to understand how the word is comprehensible to the members of the audience.
Hall further explains that the meanings and messages in the discursive "production" are organized through the operation of codes within the rules of "language."
"[3] These four stages are:[3] Since discursive form plays such an important role in a communicative process, Hall suggests that "encoding" and "decoding" are "determinate moments.
Rather, he states that events can only be transported to the audience in the audio-visual forms of televisual discourse (that is, the message goes to processes of production and distribution).
This is when the other determinant moment begins – decoding, or interpretation of the images and messages through a wider social, cultural, and political cognitive spectrum (that is, the processes of consumption and reproduction).
Hall's work has been central to the development of cultural studies, a field that had started challenging the mainstream media effects models in 1960.
The main focus was how audience members make meanings and understand reality through their use of cultural symbols in both print and visual media.
[6] Theorists such as Dick Hebdige, David Morley, and Janice Radway have been heavily influenced by Hall, and applied his theory to help develop their own: Hebdige was a British cultural and critic scholar who studied under Hall at the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
Hebdige believed that punk was incorporated into the media in an attempt to categorize it within society, and he critically examines this issue by applying Hall's theory of encoding and decoding.
Known for being a key researcher in conducting The Nationwide Project in the late 1970s, Morley took this popular news program that aired daily on BBC.
This code or position is one where the consumer takes the actual meaning directly, and decodes it exactly the way it was encoded.
Under this framework, the consumer is located within the dominant point of view, and is fully sharing the texts codes and accepts and reproduces the intended meaning.
[3] A modern-day example of the dominant-hegemonic code is described by communication scholar Garrett Castleberry in his article "Understanding Stuart Hall's 'Encoding/Decoding' Through AMC's Breaking Bad".
Castleberry argues that there is a dominant-hegemonic "position held by the entertainment industry that illegal drug side-effects cause less damage than perceived".
[9] Likewise, a viewer believing such perceptions will also be operating within the dominant-hegemonic code since they are decoding the message in the way it is intended.
The reader to a certain extent, shares the text's code and generally accepts the preferred meaning, but is simultaneously resisting and modifying it in a way which reflects their own experiences and interests.
Hall explains this when he states "decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules- it operates with exceptions to the rule".
In his example, he shows how a factory worker may recognize and agree with the dominant position that a wage freeze is beneficial.
This negative discourse, according to actress Anna Gunn, who portrayed Skylar, was because her character did not fit what was expected of a wife.
The three positions of decoding proposed by Hall are based on the audience's conscious awareness of the intended meanings encoded into the text.
TV viewers may take an aesthetically critical stance towards the text, commenting on the paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects of textual production.
According to the original model, a reader can fully share the text's code and accept its meaning, or reject it and bring an alternative frame of it.
The first step is to distinguish between the graphical model and the typology, which is different decoding positions (dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional).
Another addition to the original model is the appearance of a Neutralization category meaning that media texts encoded within an oppositional or negotiated framework are decoded according to the dominant ideology.
Let's look at the upper right corner of the Ross ideology version (Figure 1) at the cell when a radical text intersects with a dominant-hegemonic decoding position.
For example, neutralization will happen if a TV news report conveying a message about an oppositional political party in Russia may be interpreted by a conservative viewer as an evidence of the US sponsorship of anti-government organizations underlying Russian independency.
To conclude, while Hall's Encoding/Decoding model of communication is highly evaluated and widely used in research, it has been criticised as it contains some unsolved problems.